(Un)bearable Lightness of Being

A person could, with some justification, accuse me of looking at the world through rose-coloured glasses. In fact, my sunglasses, which I have been wearing a bit lately, do give a rosier hue to the tops of the trees that are responding to the warmth and light this spring, and they give a wonderful blue-green cast to the water in the cove. So yes, it may have some truth in it, both literally and metaphorically, but I don’t really care; when small events inspire a small sense of uplift, I say go with it, cherish it, because there’s enough of the other to offset the mood.

As W.S. Merwin put it so well, towards the end of his “A Message to Po Chu-I” in the March 8 issue of The New Yorker:

the wars are bigger now than ever
greed has reached numbers that you would not
believe and I will not tell you what
is done to geese before they kill them
now we are melting the very poles
of the earth but I have never known
where he would go after he leaves me

In the absence of knowing where the goose will go, or where climate change, wars, and greed will take us and our children and grandchildren, there are still some things to lift the spirit, like:

the pair of eagles circling and engaging acrobatically over the harbour when I stopped at the mailbox

the tiny perfect chickadees shifting to their spring song

the whistle in the wings of the two mourning doves in our maples

the return before sunrise of the song sparrows’ songs

the blue flash of jays at our feeders

the small red dot on the downy woodpecker’s head

the crows exulting in sun and wind and sky

the soft grey and bright white of the gull’s glide

Yesterday I joined S and the girls down by the wave sculpture at the waterfront (they sat in its shadow for the photo), and last night, in the black sky, I caught the bright sharp crescent of the newest moon just before it set.

These are all small things, perhaps, and there was the ominous reminder of someone's swastika sign on the wave, but, like our three amazing children, their wonderful partners, and three equally amazing granddaughters, there are things and moments to be cherished here and now and there are the promises they bear for our future moments.