What a day for a walk through the autumn woods. Notice the ground is slope-d, as if we are in a hilly place, unable to see too much into the distance before we come to the hill's crest. How alive this wood is - every leaf, every bit of ground, every whisp of cloud, every pathside flower is a dot, a stroke, a touch of paint on the canvas, which makes for an image that seems to vibrate with life.
The sun is playing with the trees and path. There are golden footprints on the ground. "The earth is charged with the grandeur of God," the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote. Note the word, charged. It is as if the world is electrified with God's energies. This is grace.
But how sad and dangerous for our planet that every year the earth loses three trillion trees. They are largely destroyed by human carelessness and greed: mining, drilling, deforestation for grazing and the raising of drug crops. In many places the trees are completely gone, having been chopped down or bulldozed for developments, malls, parking lots. What a sad sight, a city tree struggling for life: suffocating in the midst of traffic's poisoned air, or imprisoned in cement and asphalt.
"What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet." Hopkins - Inversnaid 1881.
To whom is Hopkins addressing his plea for nature to be left alone? God? Humankind? Is this a prayer or just an expression of his heart-desire?
To whom is Hopkins addressing his plea for nature to be left alone? God? Humankind? Is this a prayer or just an expression of his heart-desire?
