What's the weight of nothing?

It is the Christmas season. The country is in the midst of an impeachment inquiry. The nations of the world are not doing enough, fast enough, to respond to a well established need to Drawdown greenhouse gases. Day by day it becomes more difficult to communicate with those who differ from us and easier to yield to despondency. But, since it is the Christmas season, we will now share with you one of the few seasonal traditions we've started since we reached nominal adulthood. It's a short tale that goes like this:

chickadee estimating the weight of snowflakes

Photo by J. Harrington

“Tell me the weight of a snowflake,” a chickadee asked a wild dove. “Nothing more than nothing,” was the answer. “In that case, I must tell you a marvelous story,” the chickadee said.

“I sat on the branch of a fir tree, close to its trunk, when it began to snow, not heavily, not in a raging blizzard, no, just like in a dream, without any violence. Since I didn’t have anything else to do, I counted the snowflakes settling on the twigs and branch. Their number was exactly 3,741,952. When the next snowflake dropped onto the branch—nothing more than nothing, as you say—the branch broke off.”

Having said that, the chickadee flew away.

dove contemplating chickadee's story

Photo by J. Harrington

The dove, since Noah’s time an authority on the matter, thought about the story for a while, and finally said to herself: “Perhaps there is only one person’s voice lacking for peace and justice to come about in the world.”

I don't remember where I first came across that parable, but it has been part of my Christmas repertoire for about a decade and a half. Since I first read the story, I've been haunted  by the fear that mine might be the one voice needed for peace and justice to come to the world, and I'd decided to remain silent. There's a related quotation that is attributed to both Edward Everett Hale and to Helen Keller. It goes:

I am only one,
But still I am one.
I cannot do everything,
But still I can do something;
And because I cannot do everything,
I will not refuse to do the something that I can do.

After this Christmas season we'll be facing a grueling, testing and testy political campaign, compounded by disinformation and efforts at foreign interference, before we once again get to celebrate the Yule tide. Let's do what we can to bring peace and justice to the world whether we feel up to it or not.

Making Peace

By Denise Levertov

A voice from the dark called out,

             ‘The poets must give us

imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar

imagination of disaster. Peace, not only

the absence of war.’

                                   But peace, like a poem,

is not there ahead of itself,

can’t be imagined before it is made,

can’t be known except

in the words of its making,

grammar of justice,

syntax of mutual aid.

                                       A feeling towards it,

dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have

until we begin to utter its metaphors,

learning them as we speak.

                                              A line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

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