Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

by Annie Dillard

Nature seems to catch you by the tail.

“In nature,” wrote Huston Smith, “the emphasis is in what is rather than what ought to be.”

I cannot in all honesty call the world old when I’ve seen it new.

I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe a delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections but overwhelmingly in spite of them, under the wind-rent clouds, upstream and down.

Simone Weil says simply, “Let us love the country of here below. It is real; it offers resistance to love.”

love!