I stand in the garden watching a crescent moon hover above the tips of the fir trees.  The thrushes surge in their singing as they do at dusk and swallows swirl about the eves. Music drifts out an open window – my son playing piano – like I have never heard before. Teenage angst by way of Moonlight Sonata.  

I listen as he softly lands each note, pauses, then reaches for a crescendo.  Music wings like a message carried forth through centuries.  An unbearable sadness.  A piercing joy.  This is nothing I taught him – rather it rushes from the riotous unpredictability of becoming.

I have my doubts about humans.  Maybe I shouldn’t admit this, but look how we’ve messed up.  Among other things – the latest United Nations Report on Climate Change offers irrefutable evidence that a mass extinction is under way.  Surely as the sunsets.  As the moon rises.  It is what I think about as I work in the garden.  That and the pandemic most likely born of human encroachment on the wild.

I listen to the birds’ song mingle with the sonata.  A new refrain it seems.  Or ancient as ever.  We have always been a billion species together, all of us worthy, our souls mingled in unknowable ways, capable of becoming who knows what opus.  What mighty grace.  What hope.