Lives, She Was a Constant.

¶ … lives, she was a constant. She was enveloping. At many times, she was forceful. So today, as we mourn her, we do so in a state of shock, in a state of disbelief, in recognition that as many times as this very day had been ominously predicted, it seemed verily beyond our comprehension to image that it might actually come. But it is with a heavy heart and the fear of great loss that we acknowledge the arrival of this day, and that we eulogize our mother nature and our relationship with her. Both of been lost in the shuffle of modernity. First abandoned for industry, then obscured by urbanization and ultimately dispatched in favor of humanity's all-consuming ambition, nature belonged to all of us and none of us. In our possessiveness, we could not reconcile that. And now, we must suffer a world without her. On days such as this, a comforting word can be difficult to offer.

But, with a heavy heart, I can say that the passing of nature brings us great grief while bringing lush, verdant resiliency to the heavens above. As Eric Idle would observe on the passing of his close friend and former Beatle George Harrison in 2001, his "passing was really sad but it does make the afterlife seem much more attractive" (Idle, p. 1) We can say this now about our connection to nature as well, which has been lost in the wave of complexities that we refer to as life but which will be regained again when each of us returns to the dust from whence we came. If nature's effervescent vibrancy can no longer be felt, seen, heard and inhaled in our current state of vitality, each of us knows that its warm embrace is what awaits us on the other side of death's cold shadow. So even as we feel a sense of emptiness by her absence simply too expansive and hollow to fill, perhaps we can adorn it with the promise of a reunion in this eventuality which must claim us all.

Still, we should not be relegated only to treasuring our memories of nature with this eventuality at hand. First and foremost, nature has been a force connected to life, living, loving and learning. And in exchange, it has been an entity deserving of our vitality, our adoration and our attentiveness. So too mourn her must not be to forget her presence in our lives, even as imperfect as our relationship to her has been. This imperfection is critical to our humanity and the to the humanity that nature reflected back at us. We can see this in the moving words delivered by sports broadcaster on the day of baseball great Mickey Mantle's interment. Here, Costas lionizes the late Yankee slugger but does so with a grain of honesty that invokes forgiveness for the flaws in a human relationship. For Mantle, Costas tells, beyond the adulation and admiration, "he got something far more meaningful. He got love. Love for what he had been, love for what he made us feel, love for the humanity and sweetness that was always there mixed in the flaws and all the pain that racked his body and his soul." (Costas, p. 1)

For our mother nature, pain has sadly been a defining feature of her experience. Like the great maternal nurturer who sends her children into the world to make their fortune, she has selflessly given of herself until there is nothing left to sacrifice. And even then, for her children, she would proceed to make the ultimate sacrifice, giving her very life and existence so that we may have our will and whim satisfied. Perhaps it is most tragic that our will and whim did not direct us toward her protection and salvation, let alone the glory that is deservedly hers. Quite so, in her loss, we find a great many glories may never be realized. As we have sought a gratification learned outside of her bounteous majesty and even more often at its expense, we have piece by piece allowed her to pass into the hereafter.