Morning Thanks--a day's work

The word is that, as we speak, the death toll has reached 5000 and is bound to go up. How far?--no one knows. But the character of the region--villages no one has yet visited, significant poverty, no earthquake-proof housing--and the magnitude of the quake make it likely that 5000 will, soon enough, seem like, well, a blessing.

According to the New York Times, people who study such things predict the death toll will climb as high as ten times that. What happened in Nepal is catastrophic, the death toll immense, the toll of human suffering beyond imagination. As the letters so magically appear across my screen, hundreds, even thousands of people in Nepal are screaming for help.

Baltimore seems to be in civil war. The death of a black man--yet another in an endless string of brutality--has created riots, cars and buildings burning, people being hurt, hundreds of peacemakers working--often losing--to anger and sheer madness. The mayor called the looters "thugs," but the thugs, at least for a time, were school kids, which promises only more trouble.

West Baltimore is a sad place--unemployment, drugs, educational systems where even good teachers have to fight, literally, to succeed. People took to the streets in Baltimore because a man named Freddie Gray went into a police van for an infraction of some kind and came out dead. To say such things have happened too often is understatement.

The world's awash in chaos. There are good reasons to be sad, to be fearful, to wonder about the world's tipping.

But yesterday, with my very last class of all time nearing completion, the luminescent dawn promised a blessing in no uncertain terms: it was going to be a perfectly pure spring day. It's still a shade early for us to put in the garden, but all the plants that used to sit here at the window and feed off the morning sun are now happily lined up outside. My desk was cleared, my obligations at a minimum, so I decided to work outside. All day. 

"People who don't put things in the ground don't know God," an friend of mine told me once, quoting some old farmer. It could be bigotry, but neither he nor the original theologian meant it that way. What he meant was polar opposite: people who plant seeds live in adoration of the miracle of spring. When the cold siege relents, when a human being can work all day in a bath of warm sun, you know you're blessed, you know God.

What I actually did yesterday would sound like nothing, so I won't make a list. Suffice it to say that for the first time this spring I spent the entire day in our backyard acre, putzing around. That's right, just putzing. And loving it.

How many times haven't I heard stories about grandpas and grandmas who leave behind patiently tallied notes on dog-eared calendars: Feb. 26--first robin; March 5--lovely rain. 2 in.; Good Friday--potatoes. You know. That kind of thing.

Yesterday, this Grandpa thought about noting it, writing it down. Just outside my window  a couple of jetstreams had already marked the morning sky. 

But I had a grandpa's sense that something needed to be written down somewhere--"Yesterday for the first time this spring, I got my hands dirty. Hallelujah."

Baltimore is seething. People are searching for hundreds, even thousands of men and women and children who almost certainly have perished beneath the rubble. Places in the world exist where human beings couldn't rejoice in a pure dawn or a warm sun, were people couldn't take joy from little more than a windless morning.

But I could, and I did and it was a revelation, a gift, a miracle right here in my hands.

"April 29--worked outside."  

There.