And for all this, nature is never spent – Day 8 Shelter in Place

March 29, 2020. Sunset 7:30 PM.
San Francisco, CA.

My friend Mardi often stops by to share a poem at sunset these days. The first evening she read “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins. These two lines, in particular reminded me so clearly of the endurance of Nature - vast, timeless, indifferent.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
I welcome the tender optimism of this perspective and would like to share the entire poem here:

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.


Day 8 - Ringing the big bell out on the sidewalk for as long as we are sheltering in place.