Eternal Springs

The world seems so much worse today; it was bad yesterday and the day before, and the week before, and the month before, but it seems to just keep getting sadder, gloomier, more unjust, less stable. Justice has apparently fled, violence and abuse are ascendant. But beauty never disappears and it’s almost always closer than we credit: nestled quietly nearby in our children, in our friends, in our colleagues. In the day to day things we take for granted, the ones we don’t bother to screw up, at least too badly.

Beauty rests in the night sky above us, in the moon and stars inspiring faith, letting us know that there are just too many options for us to ruin them all. It thrives in nature, polluted and misused as she is but redolent with color: brilliant flora and fauna, verdant mountains and valleys, amber deserts and aquamarine oceans; studies in contrasts but breathtaking and awe inspiring. Harbingers of hope.

Interpersonal relationships we can screw up pretty well, it’s true, but not always, and when they work they may be the most beautiful things of all: trust earned and returned, love shared unselfishly, self-sacrifice for those who love us, understanding and forgiveness, when we can rise within ourselves to grant them. The things history does not record, the things philosophy ignores, the things that make the rest worth bearing.

Perhaps when everything is said and done within us there’s a trace of something Divine, something sublime, something whose quality, even in quantities too small to perceive, is enough to keep hope alive.

And who knows, ….
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2015; all rights reserved