A Beautiful Day

This is a spring full of beautiful days.  Not as dry as last year, and not as consistently warm though this year we have already logged some record breakers.  I think a lot of us get nervous about global warming.  I do.  Just today on the news I heard that my part of the world will be particularly vulnerable to disastrous floods as sea levels rise.

In other news, the flowers this year are spectacular.  They always are.  Every spring.  It is as if each year the rhododendrons, azaleas and lilacs, to name but a few, always come back in yet greater splendour than the year before.  Or perhaps through the winter we have so missed the flowers that when they appear again they are so dazzlingly beautiful that we never want them to wilt or fade.  But they do wilt.  They whither, decay and fall to the earth that waits to reclaim them just like all living things.  Just like us.

To those of us who feel guilty about enjoying this beautiful weather, the warm temperatures, the flowers, the green leaves and the bird songs, hear me:

There is nothing wrong with enjoying and celebrating beauty, even if it could be a symptom of bad times to come.  It is not the same as hiding our heads in the sand and waiting for climate change to kick our ass.  We accept that this is temporary.  We understand that the earth as we know it, through our own fault, is at risk.  We also see how slow, reluctant and absolutely stubborn are many of our politicians and corporate CEOs to effect any change to slow the speed of global warming.  We keep on driving cars and flying in airplanes and eating meat and doing everything else to keep our carbon footprint large enough to abolish our future generations.

The colours of the day surround us.  The fragrance of flowers and wet earth seduce us.  The sound of birdsong enchants and enthralls us.

Don't we know by now that life is itself a dance of death.  We infuse ourselves with joy, the celebration of the moment, that eternal nanosecond on which all the universe dances.  It could all be gone tomorrow, tonight.  We grasp and cling to the golden moment of light, each moment and we draw and extract from it all the sweetness and grace that it contains.  We do not forget that this could all end.  We remember that we all dance on the edge of a very sharp knife. 

Let us not forget to celebrate this fragile gift of life and let us also remember to be kind to one another because we are also all very fragile and to do everything in our power to rescue our planet earth.