Hopkins Was Right

Sometimes life really sucks, and I think of Yeats' lines in "The Stolen Child":

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping
Than you can understand.

Then there are other days, like today. Sun is bright, kids are happy, the air is fresh, life is good. We pulled into a parking space at the grocery store this morning and suddenly I heard honking. Seems a lady I hadn't noticed before had been waiting for that spot, and she was gesturing wildly to me from inside her car. Split-second internal debate: I got there first, do I just ignore her and stay there and make her more upset and end up feeling selfish myself, or do I give her the space I'm already parked in? WWJD? Not much doubt there. I pulled out of the space and waved to her, it's all yours ma'am. We parked further down the row, and as we walked into the grocery store I felt pretty darn good. The sun seemed brighter, air fresher. It was nice to look up from the trenches of life for a moment. Gerard Manley Hopkins was right:

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 not now reck [recognize] his rod [sovereignty]?
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 [despite] 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.