"All that I can claim to have learnt from the years I have spent in this world is

 that the only happiness is love, and that the world itself only becomes the 

dear and habitable dwelling place it is when we who inhabit it know we 

are migrants,
                                    due when the time comes to fly away to other more 

commodious skies."   Malcolm Muggeridge, The Green Stick

 

Chalet LAbri, February 1, 2003.acg

 

        Comes now the beginning of the end of winter and a few warm days to awaken dormant rhizomes as the planet tilts ever so slowly but certainly.  I follow the seasons by reading and comparing notes with the nearly century-old journal of Englands daughter Edith Holden who wrote this February 24 entry in her Nature Notes for 1906: 

Cycled to Packwood through Solihull and Bently-heath.  I passed a rookery on the way.  The rooks were all very busy building up their old nests and a great deal of chatter they made over it.  I saw a little robin gathering materials for its nestand further on, a Thrush with a beakful of long straws.  Everywhere the branches of the Willow bushes were tipped with downy white balls and the Alder-catkins were shewing very red.  In the garden of Packwood Hall adjoining the churchyard the borders were full of large clumps of single snowdrops; I brought away a great bunch.  The farmer living there brought out a little lamb to show me; one of a family of three born that morning.  I held it in my arms and it seemed quite fearless poking its little black head up into my face.  Rode home seven miles, in a storm of sleet and snow.

The birds  at my feeder this morning wear the colors of patriotism;  bluebirds, (yes, real bluebirds!), cardinals, jays all compete for their breakfast.  They know nothing of the troubles bothering the world today and would be adequately nourished without my provisions.  Some are migrants while others  are  residents in the dense woods back of the chalet.  A family of very young squirrels share the feast, entertaining me with their agility and gymnastics.

          In the news, a growing chorus of acrimony over the threatening winds of war.  Shall we as a nation be determined in our resolve to protect the freedoms gained for us at the sacrifice of so many now lying beneath the crosses of Flanders, Normandy, Arlington and thousands of other places on our planet, or shall we remain passive and allow the forces of evil to infiltrate the fiber of our constitution?  I find myself siding with the sentiments of Malcolm Muggeridge whose biography I am still reading.  He wrote that one who enjoys the relative security of England must not disdain the means by which that security is maintained, and that is force of arms.  Such freedom that he enjoyed, to live, write and say what he wanted, existed only because men were willing to risk being killed to keep it so.

 

          Socrates said the unexamined life is not worth living.  Within the university, students and professors scrutinize every possible aspect of our universe from the billions of galaxies to subatomic particles, electrons, quarks but they assiduously avoid examining their own lives.  In the wider world, we keep hectically busy and fill every free moment of our day with some form of diversion work, computers, television, movies, radio, magazines, newspapers, sports, alcohol, drugs, parties.  Perhaps we distract ourselves because looking at our lives confronts us with our lack of meaning, our unhappiness, and our loneliness and with the difficulty, the fragility, and the unbelievable brevity of life.  Pascal may have been right when he observed that if our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves the sole cause of our unhappiness is that we do not know how to sit quietly in our room. 

From The Question of God,

Armand M. Nicholi, Jr.