Wonder

  To look beyond these hills and streams for a transcendent meaning is seeming more and more like ungratefulness.  To see the thing--to really see the wonder in front of us--and not to wonder what it means may be the answer which we were not prepared to discover.

  For we add anxiety to ignorance and misery when we search for meaning.  There is, of course, no need for a search, for we swim within meaning as a great whale migrates buoyantly through his great ocean.  Meaning—if we must have it--is our existence.  How absurd for the whale to search for water.

  Just so, we wake in the cool dawn and break our fast with the earth’s meaningful energy in every bite of grain or fruit, and we continue for the rest of the day walking by light, resting by shade, and communing by love with those who share in our labors.  These fruits, lights, labors, loves, and friendships are our ocean waters.

  When man once upon a time became discontent with the given—became ungrateful? Bored? Afraid?-- he made the tragic assumption that his restlessness was a prophetic sign of an End unlike any we had ever experienced. Perhaps this led us to invent a mythological world unlike the given one of our birth in every way: no more crying, no more hunger, no more darkness.  And no more could meaning itself be a part of the familiar stuff.  Meaning, too, must be found in an immutable world of absolute ideas.  Maybe we will find it, but maybe we never will.  And the search began.

  But we can easily, this moment, return to our native land.  We can appreciate its mutability, its roughened surfaces, its tender hearts, its shining fruits, and its inevitable end.  And in returning, we will “find” meaning without having to search for it.   It will be our very existence.  Whatever our opinion of it, meaning and existence will be the same.

  If this does not sound philosophical or spiritual enough, we might do well to accept with humility the possibility that meaning is equally to be had by all people we do not understand and therefore do not love.  It is to be had, as well, by fields and rivers and the shy animals whose crepuscular lives we never will know.  And by whales.