Dancing with light
Image: Holding on

Things such as this - pod, leaf, whatever - make me think of William Faulkner and his wonderful Nobel speech where he said:

"I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. "

All this out of a stiff, mahogany, dead leaf or pod or something, sitting atop a barren rock in February admidst a cold, and steady wind? Well, yes . . . and sun and more. Unlike Faulkner, I don't think man will prevail and what's more, I don't think it matters. What will prevail is the dance. The continuing exhuberance of the spirit. The hope, and love and life that Faulkner celebrates. That will prevail and all of that comes welling up in me as I gaze on the beauty and resilence of this thing, not in its youth, but in its ending. (It was there on the pudding stone fingers of rock that reach for the sea in Newport, RI in the Norman Bird Sanctuary.