This essay is the third of three talks I recently gave to retreat groups. You’ll find the first and second as posts in the last two weeks.
Last fall the maples were late again in catching fire. By the time they lit, the black walnuts, always the first to go anyway, had dropped their leaves. I’d resigned myself to a brown fall by the time the yellow finally began to rise in the trees across around the Guesthouse. A few years ago, everyone would have said it was because it was too wet, or too cool, or whatever they seem to think the least optimal conditions for color in maples. But this year was not the first year the maples were tardy. In fact, they’ve been getting later and later, duller and duller my whole monastic life. So this year, rather than debating the merits of cool or hot, wet or dry, we all nodded knowingly, nearly resigned.
Of course the maples were shy. Who wouldn’t be after two years of pandemic, the fierce rise of nationalism, the deepening of systemic racism and white supremacy, and—underneath it all, so large we still, decades on, have few words for it—the collapse of the climate around us.
Continue reading “on joy”