THE DEAREST FRESHNESS DEEP DOWN THINGS

I have been traveling and am feeling just a teensy bit drained as in I am going to Logan six hours early Friday to try to get on stand-by for the three flights back to LA before mine.

Yes! Eager to be back in my little sanctuary: my own bed, my own coffee-maker, my own birds.

Times like this I turn especially to the life force of trees and flowers.
Times like this I think especially of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

GOD’S GRANDEUR

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

–Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877