I have been feeling very crabby lately. Some of it had to do with accepting that my lifetime dream of a better world was really just a utopian fugue, and some of it was the current spin coming out of Washington, which had me twirling in a vertigo funk. Rove's appearance before the Grand Jury is a good thing. A ridiculous idea of a $100 rebate for everyone to offset the rise in gas prices (as long as the bastards get to drill in ANWR). Talk of troop withdrawals in time for the mid-terms. Everything is manipulated and manipulable. Apple's Sherlock online dictionary defines crabby as perversely irritable. Yes. I think that describes it perfectly. I'm just now learning to accept that in every era there will always be a percentage of people who live on the fringe, on the edge, who know that life can be lived differently. Better. More compassionately. More enlightened. But that number will just never rise above statistical insignificance. Blip on the screen. It made me crabby.So I did what Wendell Berry suggests in his poem, The Peace of Wild Things. I went out and took a good look at a something wild. In the moment, for me, it was a crab. I got my feet muddy and wet, mucking through the low tide pools. I found this spineless sweetheart stranded, waiting for the return of the sea. I took a good long look. Then, I came home and weeded a few of the flower beds. Got dirt under my fingernails and found a clearer mind.
Looking deeply into this crab's eyesThe Peace of Wild Things
When despair grows in me
and I wake in the middle of the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
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