III
This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
          and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
        I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
        in pitch-black space . . .
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                      if you’re going to say “I lived”. . .

—Nazim Hikmet

 We live, all of us in a crumbling society, a crumbling world. More and more of us ordinary folks are being forced to recognize that, even as we live in the deep privilege that most who read—or write—this blog share.

It isn’t just the vacillating climate. In Minnesota we’ve had 40-below-zero wind chills, broken pipes, imploding furnaces—all impacting my own house—and it doesn’t matter whether you accept the dipping of the polar vortex due to global warming or the increased chill brought on by sun spots as the cause, we are cold.

The world is aflame with war, rampant with rape as a tool of war, disgraced by the untended orphans, the homeless, piling with the corpses of those we have left without food or medical care. Our own infrastructure crumbles and our government seems to have been brought to a standstill here at home and to be actively seeding chaos abroad. (In a recent world-wide survey, 68% of the population consulted consider the U.S. to be the primary obstacle to world peace.)

And in this profound pain what am I doing writing little stories for children? What are any of us doing devoting ourselves to literature and arts created for any audience at all?

Recently I attended a new staging of the musical, Cabaret. The show was, as it always is, compelling and absolutely chilling. And as we drove home afterward in the cold and the dark, my partner and I talked quietly, asking one another if this classic show about the Nazi desecration had been revived with any particular intent for our time, asking how many others leaving the theater were feeling a cold much deeper than the weather, much closer at hand than the Nazi era.

I am profoundly grateful for the relative peace and affluence that has surrounded me all my life and grateful, too, for the limited years I have left to live, knowing that I wouldn’t choose to go very far into the brave new world stretched out before me if I could. But I have a daughter. I have other young people who have passed through my life and my heart. I have a whole passel of grandchildren. I have this breathtakingly beautiful world. And so as the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet suggests, I must grieve. I must love this earth—and my life and the lives around me—so much that I grieve even as this sacred blue orb wobbles through its orbit.

As for the little books for children? Of course, I’m going to defend them. How can I not? Creating them has been the primary focus of my life.

But while I can’t go out and feed the unnumbered starving, while I can’t stop the wars, protect the women, gather up the orphaned, bury the forgotten dead, renew the health of the climate, while I can’t stop this spinning globe from hurtling toward destruction, I can do one small thing. I can tell my stories, my own deepest stories, knowing there are hearts out there that will be touched.

And day by day by day, it is enough.

It must be, because it is all I have to give.