Tag: Margaret Renkl

the only thing that can save us

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[…] What he understood is the difference between charity and community — a difference founded in kinship, in recognizing that we all fall down, that sometimes it takes another hand to pull us up again. “All you have to do,” he once told the novelist Ann Patchett, “is give a little bit of understanding to the possibility that life might not have been fair.” ….

What Father Strobel understood is that compassion is the only thing that can save us.

—  Margaret Renkl, from “Proof That One Life Can Change the World” (The New York Times · August 14, 2023)

Don’t miss rest of Margaret Renkl’s Opinion essay here.

Photo credit.

We belong here, possum and person alike

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The Virginia opossum who has taken to sleeping beneath our family room may likewise have only one surviving baby, but the one we have seen seems to be having a grand time figuring things out. On our trail camera, we see it climbing onto our back deck from time to time. My husband, who likes to sit out in the dark backyard and look at the moon, once heard something stirring at his feet. When he opened the flashlight app on his phone, the young opossum was sniffing a box of crackers that my husband had set on the ground.

I’m not anthropomorphizing here. To understand that we all exist in a magnificent, fragile body, beautiful and vulnerable at once, is not to ascribe human feelings to nonhuman animals. It is only to recognize kinship. We belong here, possum and person alike, robin and wren and rabbit, lizard and mole and armadillo. We all belong here, and what we share as mortal beings is often more than we want to let ourselves understand. We all have overlapping scars.

I think the ever-present threat my wild neighbors live with must tell us something about the nature of joy. The fallen world — peopled by predators and disease and the relentlessness of time, shot through with every kind of suffering — is not the only world. We also dwell in Eden, and every morning the world is trying to renew itself again. Why should we not glory in it, too?

— Margaret Renkl, from “The Nature of Joy” (NY Times, June 26, 2023)

DK Photo of White-Tailed Deer, 5:30 am. June 25, 2023. More photos from morning walk here.

Cue the World

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Cue the waking insects stirring in the leaf litter. Cue the flashing bluebirds swooping from the bare maple branches to glean the insects stirring in the leaf litter. Cue the fox in his magnificent coat shining in the moonlight, his ears pricked, his tail curled perfectly around his beautiful fox feet. Cue the hard brown buds, waiting, waiting, all through winter but just beginning to quiver. Any day now — any day! — they will warm into blossom…

The world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets. For just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them and turning them into a sheltering roundness perfectly fitted to the contours of the future they are making.

Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is shivering into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.

— Margaret Renkl, from “What to Do With Spring’s Wild Joy in a Burning World” (NY Times, March 12, 2022)

22° F, feels like 7° F.  Cue your World anytime up here Margaret. (Photo: DK @ Cove Island Park, May 4, 2021.)

Sunday Morning

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I caught my breath and walked on, with a rising sense that glory was all around me. Only at twilight can an ordinary mortal walk in light and dark at once—feet plodding through night, eyes turned up toward bright day. It is a glimpse into eternity, that bewildering notion of endless time, where light and dark exist simultaneously.

—  Margaret Renkl, Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss 

Photo: DK @ Daybreak. 6:47 a.m., January 16, 2022. 9° F, feels like 0° F. Calf Pasture Beach, Norwalk, CT. More photos from this morning here.

And now in age I bud again

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The only trouble with being born in 1961 is that in 2021 you will turn 60, something I did last week. It’s very strange to persist in feeling 22, even as every mirror — and every storefront window and polished elevator door — reveals the truth. Sixty is the point at which people must admit they are no longer middle-aged.

Lately it’s been dawning on me that I would not want to have been born even one minute later than 1961, either. Last week I mentioned this new thought to a friend, and her response was immediate, as though she’d already had it herself: “Because we won’t have to live through the cataclysm?”

Exactly.

Well, no, not exactly. On the days when headlines are full, yet again, with firestorms and catastrophic flooding and biodiversity collapse and endless pandemic and a depressingly effective disinformation campaign to deny the climate emergency — on those days, yes. Absolutely yes. On those days I am glad to be 60 because it means I almost certainly won’t live to witness the cataclysm that is coming if humanity cannot change its ways in time.

But that’s not the way I think on most days. On most days I am simply grateful for the 60 years I’ve had…

I have lived long enough to have learned, too, that what is beautiful and joyful is almost always fleeting and must never be squandered. That rejection rarely bears any relationship to worth. That whatever else might separate us, sharing a love for “Ted Lasso” is enough common ground to start the harder conversations. That life is too short to wear uncomfortable shoes…

A lifelong friend, one who will also turn 60 this year, sent me an email on my birthday. Her message contained a passage from “The Flower,” a poem by George Herbert: “Grief melts away / Like snow in May, / As if there were no such cold thing. / Who would have thought my shriveled heart / Could have recovered greenness?”

Who would have thought, indeed? But given enough time, we do go on, somehow. Like the stems and branches of springtime, our shriveled hearts can recover greenness, too. “And now in age I bud again,” Herbert wrote, and so it is with us.

— Margaret Renkl, from “I Just Turned 60, but I Still Feel 22″ in The New York Times (November 1, 2021)

Portraits: First: Margaret Renkl at Auburn University in 1983.  Credit…Billy Renkl. Second: WUTC on September 15, 2021 at 4:37 PM EDT