This week I am taking a trip Far Away, for the first time in quite a while. I remember now how much I love that moment when the plane lifts above the clouds, up where it is always sunny. I remember what a delight it is to splash my face with water after a long journey. I remember how wonderful it is to wake to the sound of different birds in different trees.  

I also remember jet lag and customs lines and forms with teeny tiny print asking cryptic questions that feel like ancient riddles. I remember how, after a long while of doom-scrolling in the dark (which isn’t really doom-scrolling when it is the actual news), we can walk outside, wherever we are, and find a tiny scrap of wonder. A perfect spiral of shell by the water, a scraggly defiant bloom of witch hazel in the snow, the thump of our own feet on the ground.

Dear ones, in the dark swirling of the world,

may the day-blind stars send us glimmers of wonder,

to see us through.

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

      –  Wendell Berry