Today we may hope we are Heaven-bound, but maybe it's worth remembering that we can get there only through what we do here on earth.
In that spirit, I read this piece about Rachel Carson in the New Yorker. In our old Unitarian Church, starting indoor seedlings for the church garden and Rachel Carson were part of our Easter observances. The Easter season ended roughly when the seedlings had grown hardy enough to be planted outdoors in Michigan the first week of June.
While Carson was perhaps not particularly religious in a conventional sense, she was clearly awed by and in love with creation, and she spent her life studying and trying to defend it.
I remembered a quote of hers about christenings that I had heard in my young years, and spent most of this morning trying to find it. Without some innate and natural sense of God, how could she have written this, which now reads to me like a prayer:
If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world would be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from our sources of strength.
You could certainly do worse than to ask for these blessings.
Happy Easter, everyone!
Thanks for the Rachel Carson quote, Jean. I think she and St. Francis of Assisi would have been kindred spirits (maybe they are now). When I was a grade school kid one of my schoolteacher aunts gave me a coffee table edition of The Sea Around Us. I loved it, and loved the pictures. Later on I enjoyed The Edge of the Sea, also by Rachel Carson. With my granddaughters I am trying to be the good fairy that nurtures that sense of wonder in the natural world.
ReplyDeleteHappy Easter to you, also!
Good Friday in the local bookstore saw "Go, Went, Gone." Decided to mark the end of Lent by reading it.
ReplyDeleteAs you say, it is not sentimental..My dread in reading, as I said before, has to do with what I should be doing about refugees, immigrants, besides being in favor of them coming and staying.
Richard does, so far, have a way and it inspires several thought about some things that could be done.
So Jean, Good Work!
Glad you liked it! One of my favorites of this year.
DeleteGod had a reason for putting Passover and Easter in the Spring (northern hemisphere) when life is returning to barren lands.
ReplyDeleteThe desert and the parched land shall exalt;
the steppes will rejoice and bloom.
They will bloom with abundant flowers
and rejoice in the joyful song.