In “Some Thoughts on the Common Toad” (1942), George Orwell muses:
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in Spring and other seasonal changes? To put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living because of a blackbird’s song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle?
I learned of the essay in this short film by G Anthony Svatek (via Aeon.co), which features a wonderful reading by Tilda Swinton.
Orwell wrote this essay during the winter of 1942, deep in the winter of a devastating world war. Orwell, again: “The atom bombs are piling up in the factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.”
We have our winters, too — real and metaphorical. The privilege I enjoy is immense. My family and I are safe, when so many others are not. As far as I can tell, we will not be abducted by ICE. We will not be deported. We will not be disappeared, or made illegal because of our identities.1
Like Orwell, I can decry the inhumanity of these times, the cruelty of these wannabe autocrats, and I can seek wicked, subversive joy in observing the seasonal changes of Spring.
Bloodroot, Sanguinaria canadensis, a first flower of Spring
Diffuse Dawn
Diffuse dawn spills over the eastern ridge
floods the room
not to drown
but to fill up this cubic space
for today, light is love
for no other reason than
I am alive
I am here
I feel this life
The atoms of matter
congeal into slow time
radiant energy
I hold in my hands
like cool morning sand
And can you hear the birds?
The chickadees alight
duets, trios, quartets
the constellations of frenetic song
the rise and fall of melodic habit
they sing — regardless!
How embarrassing that I
would ever think otherwise –
the hubris of humans
to orient, to bend this world
to our willful eye
Now, the golden orb crests the
summit, capping these
reflections like punctuation –
exclamation mark!
The dusty film on the window
glass glows (another task
undone, the window washing)
I sit in this moment
a cosmic sponge, the matter
of my soul
depends on it
ICE and CPB are detaining and deporting immigrants and migrants in Vermont. See “US Border Patrol arrests 8 migrant workers at Berkshire dairy”, “Palestinian man legally in the US detained in Colchester during citizenship interview”, “Tufts graduate student was held in Vermont after arrest in Massachusetts by immigration agents, feds say”. One way to help is by donating to the ACLU of VT and Migrant Justice / Justicia Migrante.↩︎