“If you now wonder where you can look for comfort, where you can look for a new and better God,” wrote Hermann Hesse in his wartime manifesto of hope in difficult times, “he does not come to us from books, he lives within us… he is in you and… especially in you, the depressed and depressed.”
At the same time, on the other side of the world, DH Lawrence was at odds with the multitudes that live within us: “The gods, the unknown gods, came out of the forest to cleanse my personality, and then came back.”
That there is not one god but many, that they are not only within us but around us in forests and seas and microcosms of moss, is what Terry Tempest Williams offers The Glorians: A Visitation from a Common Shrine (public library) – the vespers of the burning earth, the rosary of staying against despair combined with the emphasis that “the wilderness is the source of our consciousness” and living consciously “means staying close to the bone with trust, ease, and uncertainty.” You write:
The gods I recognize are many, many, mysterious, and limitless – omnipresent and common, with mouths and eyes and arms and legs, with wings and hooves and wings and fur, with holes in trunks and stems and leaves and seeds and, in the case of the horned lizard, with eyes that can bleed as a warning to the flesh. Be aware and be careful. The gods before me are great and small, they are under water and rooted in the ground, some live inside the bodies of others, others live without being seen. The supreme minds of these gods reside in all shapes and sizes and their abodes are never-ending and endless. We have a hand in their survival and they have a hand in ours.
Interwoven throughout this book is a clear, bright realization that “there must be something deeper than hope” – more prayerful, more meaningful, more comforting about life.
In line with Simone Weil's insistence that “attention is a rare and pure form of giving,” she writes:
Our job is to pay attention and listen… Finding beauty in a broken world creates beauty in the world we find.
Train Darwin on the spirituality of nature and Camus on how to live fully in a broken world, and visit these blessings of an unbroken world.
