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I want to tell you that the world is still beautiful. I tell you that despite children raped on city streets, shot down in school rooms, despite the slow poisons seeping from old and hidden sins into our air, soil, water, despite the thinning film that encloses our aching world. Despite my own terror and despair. I want you to look again and again, to recognize the tender grasses, curled like a baby's fine hairs around your fingers, as a recurring miracle, to see that the river rocks shine like God, that the crisp voices of the orange and gold October leaves are laughing at death. I want you to look beneath the grass, to note the fragile hieroglyphs of ant, snail, beetle. I want you to understand that you are no more and no less necessary than the brown recluse, the ruby- throated hummingbird, the humpback whale, the profligate mimosa. I want to say, like Neruda, that I am waiting for "a great and common tenderness," that I still believe we are capable of attention, that anyone who notices the world must want to save it.
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