A Deep River Year - 2017
How quickly the beauty that may be all around us can come to be seen as ordinary. Here in late March the snow is nearly gone and clumps of snowdrops are blooming everywhere. Two or three weeks ago we would have stopped to gaze at them with joy, perhaps even to celebrate such a lovely foretoken of Spring. But now they have been around for weeks, and the lawns and woods seem to abound with them. It is no big deal to announce that you have snowdrops in your yard. Everybody does.
How quickly the beauty that may be all around us can come to be seen as ordinary. Here in late March the snow is nearly gone and clumps of snowdrops are blooming everywhere. Two or three weeks ago we would have stopped to gaze at them with joy, perhaps even to celebrate such a lovely foretoken of Spring. But now they have been around for weeks, and the lawns and woods seem to abound with them. It is no big deal to announce that you have snowdrops in your yard. Everybody does.
And this is true of other things, too. The magnificent and huge maple tree outside my window right now is old and gnarled and stalwart in the March wind. If the same tree rose somewhere on the prairie, it would be given a name and heralded as a local tourist attraction. I watch squirrels at the feeders in my yard with amusement. Some people look at them with disdain and would rid the neighborhood of them. But what if there were only one squirrel in all the world, and it showed up in my yard. I would be out there to take its picture, to marvel at its agility and cleverness, to remark on its glorious tail.
I should find such beauty in all the common components of my life. Look at my hand, this amazing machine that holds a pencil and scratches my head and feels the softness of my wife's face. Behold a cup of water, that material which takes the shape of its container, falls from the sky in silver beads, and runs down a dry throat with delicious coolness. See our cat, Ming, stretched out over on the radiator, purring with satisfaction, incscrutable as he looks at me through half-opened eyes. I as sure that he is unimpressed with how beautiful I am, too.
Snowdrops
You are lovely
out there in the debris
of forgotten summers,
there among the fallen branches
and the bones of mice.
And now you have risen
into the cold light
of a reluctant season,
and, awakened,
have been buried again
by unwelcome snow.
But you endure,
your tender bells
silent in the wind,
thousands of you
in wood and field,
inviting the first hungry bee
to discover
the simple loveliness
of you.
--Timothy Haut
I should find such beauty in all the common components of my life. Look at my hand, this amazing machine that holds a pencil and scratches my head and feels the softness of my wife's face. Behold a cup of water, that material which takes the shape of its container, falls from the sky in silver beads, and runs down a dry throat with delicious coolness. See our cat, Ming, stretched out over on the radiator, purring with satisfaction, incscrutable as he looks at me through half-opened eyes. I as sure that he is unimpressed with how beautiful I am, too.
Snowdrops
You are lovely
out there in the debris
of forgotten summers,
there among the fallen branches
and the bones of mice.
And now you have risen
into the cold light
of a reluctant season,
and, awakened,
have been buried again
by unwelcome snow.
But you endure,
your tender bells
silent in the wind,
thousands of you
in wood and field,
inviting the first hungry bee
to discover
the simple loveliness
of you.
--Timothy Haut
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