The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning, but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life.
The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, “Do it again”; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, “Do it again” to the sun, and every evening, “Do it again” to the moon.
It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. (paragraph breaks added)
Source: Orthodoxy, GK Chesterton
Congratulations for continuing to extend your talents.
I was down at the beach the other day, and was surprised to see three wild ducks attending a human picnic. They were waddling around in among human feet, and other body parts, with complete disregard for potential danger from much larger beings. Bits of food, I suppose, but still surprising to see them shrugging off generations of caution.
Jim T
Jim – That level of habituation to human presence is a bit disconcerting, isn’t it? We saw animals and birds in the Galapagos who had no learned fear of humans, but it’s rare outside that isolation context.