Thank Goodness for Pigeons

I know these posts sound a little bipolar. I'm heartbroken about what happened to the pets abandoned in New Orleans, and exuberant about having all my limbs. I'm breaking up. No wait, I'm getting engaged.

When I take the large view of things, I feel slammed by the misery of existence - the incredible suffering in the world. My mind reels with things to worry about: eroding riverbanks, political prisoners, starving polar bears, women in labor with no one to help them, parrots suffocating in smugglers' suitcases, child prostitutes, veal calves aching in their tiny crates, and everything else that is wrong. I realize the world my children grow up in will be radically different from the one I know today, and that the change will be for the worse. While life on earth will always find a way, the beauty and richness and complexity that we know today is going to suffer - we're heading for a pinch, and it's going to be bad. I feel helpless and crazy at the thought of the immeasurable loss. At the same time, perhaps mercifully, I can't hang onto those thoughts for long. I take solace in the flight of pigeons wheeling around the park (I know! They're invasive - and I know! The park is full of homeless men sleeping on benches. But still, I love watching the pigeons.), or the affection in the eyes of a friend, or even, ridiculously, the pleasure of eating more potato chips than are good for me. As small and meaningless as these things are, they keep out the darkness. And they come up, again and again, irresistably. Jane Kenyon had it right with "Happiness":

Happiness

There's just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basket maker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

-Jane Kenyon