Everywhere We Look
The moon was beautiful last night.
Maybe you missed it, but if you were outside you probably didn’t, because it was so big and bright. And beautiful. In fact, it was SO beautiful that perfect strangers stopped in the middle of the street and pointed it out to each other. (I was one of them!)
And then early this morning, there was a total eclipse. A “blood moon” in which, thanks to refraction by the earth’s atmosphere, both the eclipse and the rising sun could be seen simultaneously.
What an amazing and beautiful world we live in.
In honor of which, I offer this excerpt from “Gravel,” by Mary Oliver. (The entire poem can be found here.)
It is the nature of stone
to be satisfied.
It is the nature of water
to want to be somewhere else.
Everywhere we look:
the sweet guttural swill of the water
tumbling.
Everywhere we look:
the stone, basking in the sun,
or offering itself
to the golden lichen.
It is our nature not only to see
that the world is beautiful
but to stand in the dark, under the stars,
or at noon, in the rainfall of light,
frenzied,
wringing our hands,
half-mad, saying over and over:
what does it mean, that the world is beautiful–
what does it mean?