Green

 

Four weeks ago, I landed in this tropical green sanctuary. During the day, working from home, I look out through a full wall of windows into a small and lush garden. Green is the dominant colour I see. As the day progresses and the clouds come and go, the shades of green shift subtly. What doesn't change is the quiet serenity I experience.

My windows are open all day long, so I hear the endless rustling of leaves and birds singing. Hummingbirds and butterflies float through lazily, oblivious to my endless string of Zoom calls. 

When so much is going wrong in the world, pausing to focus on soaking up the green of life makes me believe that all can be well. Somewhere on the edge of my consciousness Gerard Manley Hopkins keeps drifting through with his poem, "God's Grandeur":

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;

    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil

Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;

    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;

    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil

Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;

    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;

And though the last lights off the black West went

    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —

Because the Holy Ghost over the bent

    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.