As I do, Moore finds beauty in the ordinary
stuff of the world. And it leads her, as it should lead all of us, to gratitude. In the essay "The Sacred and the Mundane" she writes:
The mundane - the stuff of our lives - is irreplaceable, essential, eternal, and changing, beautiful and fearsome, beyond human undersanding, worthy of reverence and awe. The English word for this combination of qualities is "sacred...." If the mundane is sacred, and the sacred is mundane; if there are not two worlds, but one, and it is magnificent and mysterious enough to shake us to the core; if this is so, then we - you and I and the man on the beach - ought to live lives of gladness and gratitude.
Then, every act of gratitude or gladness is a counterforce to those who would make the stuff of the earth into commodities only, as the writer Freeman House pointed out. Gladness lifts the material world out of the merely mundane and makes it wonderful, and reminds us that as we use the sacred stuff of our lives for human purposes, we must do so gratefully, with full hearts.
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Oh, would that Paul Hoffman believed any of this, would that he'd ever had a grateful, non-commercial moment in his life: this Hoffman, who - according to the New York Times - is the deputy assistant secretary at Interior proposing to undermine the protected status of our national parks, to open them to oil and mineral exploration, and to ease Park restrictions on off-road vehicles, snowmobiles, and Jet Skis. His secret draft revision of the park systems management policy, prepared without consultation within the National Park Service itself, would explicitly allow the sale of religious merchandise, would remove any reference to evolution, and would strip away the scientific basis for park management. Not surprisingly he envisions a wider range of commercial activities within the parks.
TIRADE MODE ON: My anger at this news knows no bounds. Our national parks do not belong to the Bush administration, to do with as they wish. They are ours. They are to be "protected," not "conserved" - Hoffman's minor change of wording which considerably softens the standard used to gauge the effects of park policy. :TIRADE MODE OFF.
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I so much envy the way Moore writes of the world in "One Night, of Three Hundred Sixty-five." She thinks she sees a miracle, then realizes "it's just the everyday working of the world."
Warm moist air encounters cold air and turns to shards of ice. Light catches the crystal planes. Tundra swans fly in to feed. Geese cry out. The lake reflects the sky. That's the real miracle: that it's no miracle at all, just Earth, sailing on in the dark.
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Continued at Part Six, below....
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