A TOO-SMALL HOUSE

We have got to be clearheaded about human beings because we are still each other’s only hope.

James Baldwin

A great man said, “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

What holds our house together?

Only the bolts and nails of fear and hope? If so, we imagine a too-small house.

Our true one is broad and deep, undivided, enmeshed with the two-legged, four-legged, the finned and rooted, the flowing and the mineralized. Nothing sits fixed.

This is a house whose freedom resides in its confinement limits paired with possibilities: the squirrel finds a million trees to climb all the while knowing enough to hide from the hawk.

Our final arbiter, the groaning earth, moves while fixed in a planetary ecosystem, an entangled order of forces we barely understand, borne through the heavens toward a future none of us will grow old enough to know.

A giant telescope in the sky reveals an ancient light, an explosive violence, sheltering a creativity we cannot comprehend. Here is our mutual birthplace, a house larger than any nation once, and even still, making us new with a newness in which Baldwin’s hope resides: that we might see each other in the mirror of ourselves, see ourselves in the eye of the spider, doe and the wolf, that we might grow into our newness, new enough to love one another, with faith enough to carry a remembrance for future generations who might if we are brave enough now have the choice to learn.

Jennifer Wallace