Living is a Miracle

Barbara Kingsolver can write a person’s socks off. Perhaps a case of judging a book by its cover but one of her books, a collection of essays, has for its cover a pair of scarlet macaws flying across rainforest in Costa Rica. The text and the cover thus burned themselves into my hippocampus, biding time till present fruition.

I am sitting on our viewing deck, a warm rain dripping through the canopy high above me. Around our cottage are numerous hibisci and other flowering bushes, each it seems with its own resident hummingbird. I have seen four different species here. They are constantly engaged in high speed aerial combat fending off interlopers bent and on nectar and wife thievery. Then it is to their own tended flowers that they return, wings a blur with beak gently probing the flowers, David Attenborough all the while lending commentary. Out of sight amongst the tree tops, howler monkeys are are calling across the forest. The noise can be arresting, sounding more like a tyrannosaurus than a primate.

Nights are warm and buggy. Days mostly cloudy with long rainy hours in the evening. The daily cycle of returning water to a sodden earth. The sun when it appears is bright and very hot. The ocean clear and hilariously warm. The undergrowth, rank and ever decaying, as though life and return are in some great struggle. Nature’s red tooth and claw are evident to match each wild iridescence.

This is a generative world though, and as I sit up here it is as good as walking on water.