The bee is not afraid of me

 

The bee is not afraid of me

by Emily Dickinson

 

 

The bee is not afraid of me,

I know the butterfly;

The pretty people in the woods

Receive me cordially.

The brooks laugh louder when I come,

The breezes madder play.

Wherefore, mine eyes, thy silver mists?

Wherefore, O summer's day?

 

July carried me away in a whirl of gardening!   Now it is August and I am turning my mind to the upcoming semester.  I'll be teaching one section of Modernity in Literature ( same course I've taught for about twelve years) and again on Zoom.

Covid is surging again.  A new "Delta" variant,  and this time around about 60% of the US population is vaccinated.  But that other 40% are refusing for a variety of crazy reasons.  We vaccinated folks , it turns out , can still get Covid, but a mild case with flu-like symptoms, which doesn't mean you won't feel very sick.  And worse, we can still transmit the virus, even if we don't get it.  So the country is moving back to mask mandates --- or at least to begging people to wear masks.  

I blame Donald Trump for brainwashing so many Americans into believing this virus, and this vaccine, is some kind of hoax.  They are dying as a result.

painting by Mats Rydston

I love this prayer from Teilhard's  The Divine Milieu:

“It was joy to me, O God, in the midst of the struggle, to feel in developing myself I was increasing the hold that you have upon me; it was a joy to me, too, under the inward thrust of life or amid the favorable play of events, to abandon myself to your providence.

Now that I have found the joy of utilizing all forms of growth to make you, or to let you, grow in me, grant that I may willingly consent to this last phase of communion in the course of which I shall possess you by diminishing in you.

When the signs of age begin to mark my body (and still more when they touch my mind); when the ill that is to diminish me or carry me off strikes from without or is born within me; when the painful moment comes in which I suddenly awaken to the fact that I am ill or growing old; and above all at that last moment when I feel I am losing hold of myself and am absolutely passive within the hands of the great unknown forces that have formed me; in all those dark moments, O God, grant that I may understand that it is you who are painfully parting the fibers of my being in order to penetrate to the very marrow of my substance and bear me away within yourself.”

Amen