Christmas letter: We Shall Be a New Species
Snowman on the farm. Photo by Lindsay Bradbury
By Kathleen Stocking
Sun contributor
Outside my window a crescent moon is slowly descending toward the snow-covered trees outlining the bend in the river. If my eyes aren’t deceiving me, the moon appears to become more orange the closer it gets to the earth.
A few hours later, on the BATA bus, I mention my new discovery about the changing color of the moon to the driver. He has always known this. I wonder if everyone knows this but me.
So much to know, so little time. We are all on the same path, just in different places, not only in the stages of one’s present existence—young, middle-aged, old—but in all the generations who have come before and might come later.
This wild, unwieldy world. So much grief. The pandemic. The homeless under bridges. The Ukrainians, without bridges. The horrible wars.
What do we get from grief? Someone asked comedian Stephen Colbert this recently and he said, “You get awareness of other people’s loss, which allows you to connect with that other person, which allows you to love more deeply, and to understand what it’s like to be a human being.” Colbert lost his father and two brothers when he was 10, so he knows.
Looking out onto a battlefield strewn with corpses, Abraham Lincoln said, “I am almost ready to say this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet.” In other words, we are learning something from all this misery. And that can probably be said about all misery, all wars. Each time we find ourselves in a new place in our evolution, we have to change our ways of thinking.
Abraham Lincoln invokes God, something Van Gogh calls, “the infinite and the miraculous.” I believe God, love, the infinite and the miraculous are interchangeable.
There was a character in a book I read as a kid, a hunter standing in the forest, a snowstorm coming, and the line in the text was, “Thorgild’s only wish was to share his life with someone who loved him.”
And isn’t that so true? For all of us. The coming storm will always be there, but someone to love us? Like Thorgild, we wish for it.
Abraham Lincoln grew up in the wilderness, wearing animal skins and chopping wood. My parents grew up before cars. I grew up with street protests. Now we have the Internet and the World Cup and eight billion people who need to get along somehow.
For me the beauty and surprise of a moon setting above a river on a winter night, a moon that’s white high up and golden as it come closer to the river, is both sustaining and inspiring, filling my heart with love for something unnameable and bringing a sweet kind of peace. What I see is that each generation has a different path, a different set of cultural constraints and freedoms and that as we evolve, thoughts and feelings changing, we’ll become a new species and the love we knew in the cave, and keep discovering, will get us there.
This story was sponsored by Honor Building Supply.
