Whenever I get a chance to walk along a seashore (which isn't nearly often enough), I find myself contemplating chaos theory. The butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the planet, and the tiny currents ripple through the atmosphere over time to change what, according to man's scale of prediction anyway, would have happened otherwise. Toes in the sand alter the rippled patterns of sand that washes back out to sea, changing forever the shape and direction of waves. I walk along the shore and change the universe.Of course, in the environmentalist view, that's probably viewed as a negative impact, but I don't see it that way. As Hopkins wrote,
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And bears 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 from the black west went,
Oh, morning at the brown brink eastwards springs—
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast, and with, ah, bright wings.
Never spent, despite all the trodding footprints that were, after all, part of the original design.
People too, composites of decisions made, impacts of people by whom we've been influenced and touched. Another kind of "footprints," hopefully not as bleared and smeared as those Hopkins describes.
But they are just that bleared and smeared at times, as described in my last post. What is it about human nature that tries to out-hurt those who have hurt us by wounding deeper than we have been wounded, out-do whatever is donen to us, sometimes for good but more often for ill--out-Herod Herod as the saying goes. Footprints that change the universe of a psyche, a life, a relationship, a trust. Chaos. The butterfly flaps its wings . . . .
I have been in Florida for a week. Watched birds swoop down over the breaking waves to feed, sand crabs peep up out of the sand and duck under again, jellyfish wash ashore to melt in the sun like globs of goo on the sand, scavenger birds feed on prey washed ashore by the waves and left behind by humans, and human scavengers follow the daily beachgoers with metal detectors searching for lost treasures to call their own. The butterfly flaps its wings . . . .
Tomorrow I fly home. Welcome thought.
