We Must Grow, Like a Root

It is easy to exaggerate our current gloom. Especially when it plays out in front of us each day across the myriad of media outlets.

Things are bad, yes. Our culture is fraught with disdain, disregard, and the dismissal of rules, standards, and traditions. We are a spoiled society, for the most part, lost in our feelings of entitlement and selfishness, our stubborn beliefs and our unwillingness to revere all humanity, even our own.

That, of course, is not the whole story. We do have our better moments, our acts of heroism, our generosity, our compassion, our love. There are vast places across this bleeding nation that are filled with decency, neighborliness, kind words, and good deeds. Not everyone is a bully or a liar, a manipulator or abuser. The country is populated with, yes, saints and angels, people of spiritual and emotional depth, thinking people, noble people who lift, who inspire, who instruct the rest of us in a way of life that doesn’t dominate but cultivates.

Acclaimed film director, Martin Scorsese, has said, “You don’t make up for your sins in church. You do it in the streets. You do it in the home.” And that is where real life is lived and always has been lived. And it is there that we can still see the best that we are as a people. Not in the backrooms of Congress, or the boardrooms of giant corporations, but in the streets where we live, in the homes where we are ourselves. In the grace we extend. In the warmth we create. In the affection we share.

Poet Denise Levertov, one of my favorites, has written:

“In the dark I rest

unready for the light which

dawns

day after day,

eager to be shared.

Black silk, shelter me.

I need

more of the night before I open

eyes and heart

to illumination. I must still

grow in the dark like a root

not ready, not ready at all.”

For many of us, maybe all of us, that is where we are. Resting in the dark, unready for the light. And so, exposed to the worst we can do to one another, perhaps we will see our way to a larger human capacity. One that enables us to grow in this darkness like a root, until we have had enough, until we have tired of the musky soil of inertia we doze in, until we long to be ready for the light, until at last, we mature.

© 2018 Timothy Moody