I don’t really read blogs. Opinion is much overrated.
Peace, in my experience, is opinion-averse.
And yet here I’ve been invited to contribute to the Babelsphere
and further disturb the peace—only allow me, please, not “posts,” but
meditations. Musings made in the wee hours, between two and four in the
morning, daily for a week.
Seven days: but what is “seven” and what are “days”?
Already I’m a subject of the sun, the moon, the currents of creation.
Seven meditations on creation, then. Let them begin.
My theme is creation. “In the beginning was the word”
isn’t Genesis, it’s John. “In the beginning,” writes the poet Moses, “God said,
‘Let there be light.’” Well, after all, what good is the word if it’s too damn
dark to read?
So here I sit in a pool of it at my kitchen table, five 60W
12V Westinghouse bulbs marked CHINA, made less glaring by the grace of a dimmer
in the switch. Seven feet away, on the other side of the window glass, the
night’s black ink spills for a thousand miles, ten thousand, a billion. I write
in light, my laptop my Lite-Brite. Up a little comes the mind’s heavy curtain. It
is impossible not to feel holy and uncertain.
Yesterday my wife says she read some report: six in ten kids
say they don’t believe the earth will be around by the time they reach
adulthood.
What a failure of imagination is this. Or worse. A
failure of discipline.
Not theirs, of course, but ours. What a great noisy doom-saying
din we’ve raised for our children, and what has the doing undone? We have
become so literal, so scientific, and so prescriptive about what we tell
children that we’ve effectively rid the world of wonder. A child must love the
world in order to want to save it.
I have two kids myself, one nine, one a month from seven.
They go to a Waldorf school where computers aren’t allowed in the classroom. And
what’s wrong with that? The poem, too, is a low-tech education.
A poem—and maybe a life—is good if the gleam of creation
can be seen in its light.
And by now already my inner dimmer is calling me to bed.
Good night.