Month: June 2019

I hope the stars laugh gently

I hope if the stars are laughing at us it is gently, gently, because they know everything will turn out all right in the end and this was all all all a twisting turning cliff-tumbled footpath to that final sweetness. I hope if the stars are laughing at us it is gently, gently, because we are so young and tired and wild and so afraid that the world is ending and they have watched the word’s heartbeat stutter and steady and stutter and steady and it would take more than this to shake such ancient bones. I hope if the stars are laughing at us it is gently, gently, because oh, I cannot bear anything else, but they sing a tapestry older then pain and younger then righteousness and surely they have watched long enough to begin to understand what it is to hurt and cry and love and try. I hope if the stars are laughing it is gently, gently, gently.

For Want of Wonder

“The world will never starve for want of wonders; but only for want of wonder.” – G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles.

Reader be warned, this is not quite a essay on wonder and joy in daily life, and not quite a book-review for Tremendous Trifles; it seems to have become an odd and long amalgam of both.

Some kind onlooker from above must have been nudging me today, for it was absolutely by chance that I stumbled on a trove of free Chesterton books on Gutenberg and picked up Tremendous Trifles. Barely an essay or two into Chesterton’s delightful ramblings, and he’d made it clear to me exactly what idea of small joys had been tugging at the fringes of my brain for a week now, a reflection that I’d been longing to write without knowing quite what I meant to say.

“We may, by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us, force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfill their mysterious purpose.”

Continue reading “For Want of Wonder”