World, I Love You to Pieces Despite How Harsh You Can Be

World, you’re a paradox of placid shoreline and earthquake swallowing of life. You’re a dual attitude of melody and screech. You are as much profound meaning as you are pointlessness.

As a human, I want the former without the latter. If I can make peace with the fact that you are always both, perhaps I will become more grounded in you. My feeling brain knows both of you well. My thinking brain is the glitch. Can I come to admit this duality? Can I accept it?

SOUND

Sometimes it’s a harmonic dream to hear you, World — impassioned electric guitars, reedy saxophone magic, Bach’s cello suites, Louis Armstrong’s Wonderful World, banjos, Elton John, Emmylou Harris, bagpipes. It’s futile to list.

You hold me with the pillow-soft call of the great horned owl, the wee assertions of a newborn, the ting of chimes in near-stillness.

My sister and I saw Brandi Carlile two summers ago. After a loud, rocking set, the stage got quiet. A single acoustic guitar began to play, then three voices started in unison. My sister exhaled one of those involuntary sighs when something is too beautiful for words.

The song “The Eye” opens with a sky-cracking harmony among the band, and it’s nearly too much for the heart. Sound waves that do such a thing place you at the precipice of a beauty-induced surrender, then ground you with no counsel on how you’re supposed to process it. You can’t. You can only moan and walk away speechless.

But, World, your sound kills the heart, too. The screams of terror, cries of loss. The explosions of war, the rage of fire consuming everything folks ever owned, the smack of life hitting the ground, the searing words of conflict, the doomed squeal of tires, gunshots. Even my own muted tears when life gets tough are heard deep within my gut.

I squeeze my ears, shut my eyes, and plead for the best. But why? Here is the duality I seek to understand.

SIGHT

You are visually particular, World, and I revel in this. I paint my memory with patterns of your dormant bare branch tree canopy around here. It’s woven on a loom of civil twilight, a crisscross of black lines on an orange-yellow-blue-black metamorphosis of day to night. Of sun to moon. Of work to sleep. The branch lines are a logical expansion and an illustrator’s dream. I want to remember this forever.

I don’t want to remember your cruel imagery — of town-leveling storms, of genocide, disease and drought, flood and poverty, pencil-thin famine, of suicide and extinction, of nuclear weapons.

I don’t want to see any of this, but I must if I want to perceive you wholly.

NUMBERS

Perhaps the hardest of all to accept is your numbers. I can understand why animals would do what they do. I can’t make any sense of the detached infinitude of the company you keep. The length of time, the size of space, the number of objects out there in the universe — it’s too much.

The light I see tonight from the stars of the Big Dipper, on average, was emitted when my grandparents were born. They lived two long, full lives, died many years ago, and just now that light arrives at my retina.

The light from one of my favorite stars, Betelgeuse, the shoulder of the Orion constellation, finally finished its roughly 642-year-long journey to my eye last night. I stood in my yard and received this spec of light that had been traveling here at 180K miles per second since The Hundred Years’ War.

Our galaxy contains 100–400 billion stars, of which our sun is one.

Our galaxy is one of hundreds of billions to trillions of galaxies in our universe.

Me no compute.

Should I not look at the night sky so much? Maybe that’s the trouble. But how could I not? It holds all the answers I can’t understand to the misguided questions I ask.

MAKING SENSE

Regardless of what we believe, the mind-boggling reality out there is a challenge to our constant desire to know. We’re curious creatures and I love this about us, but there come times when I simply won’t be able to know what I want to know.

This seems to be ever truer the more technologically advanced our species becomes. Forget about billions of galaxies. I barely understand gravity. Forget about human cruelty or susceptibility. I barely understand my own mind.

I look out this window and watch a male and female cardinal in that bush over there. They hop after each other on the interior branches. They seem purposeful as they concern themselves with this activity. It’s captivating to watch. Why? There must be something about watching true engagement.

And maybe that’s where I land.

Those birds and I— we only have today. I might as well hop around on my own branches. Not one of those billions of stars or all the duality in you, World, can hop on my branches. That’s only for me.

That must count for something — probably more than I’ll ever know.