Last night, dirt road near home, I encountered two fawns, cheerfully unaware of the world into which they were born, hopes high, limbs limber, utterly guileless. I stopped. They stopped. They wandered up, looked me over, and bounded off. For a moment, my mind went with them. Imagine…
Imagine if the world we live in had more innocence and less guile. Imagine if those trusted never let us down. Imagine if the systems into which we are born worked, and expectations framed were met. Imagine if what you saw was what was, not some manipulation, not a product of human design, but divine.
Imagine if newness greeted you around each corner, freshness born of not knowing, but also not fearing. Imagine all the world was yours, each sunrise a delight, peace settled over you at night.
Imagine you knew you were protected, not sure why, or why you even had limbs, eyes, smell, touch, but all things were a source of curiosity, and yet about them each you did not care very much.
Imagine staring long minutes into the mystery that lay before you speaking, not like a squirrel or owl, not like a loon or creak when trees above shook, but something you never saw; a brook.
Imagine walking at dawn in fog, lower legs damp, head in the clouds, green trees parting as you depart the meadow, now sandy underfoot, suddenly chilly and you shake, what is this? A lake.
Imagine the way Robert Browning did, writing 200 years ago, as if you could know only what you want to know, no more, no less, like his carefree character Pippa, skipping in her cotton dress.
He wrote, as he imagined she might think, offering a window on the kind of mind we can create, take with us anywhere we go, an attitude that tempers the world’s worst with hope, a God wink.
“The year’s at the spring and day’s at the morn; Morning’s at seven; the hill-sides dew-pearl’d. The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn, and God’s in His heaven. All’s right with the world!”
It’s not of course, and was not then, but there are shafts of light that come to us, like fawns on a dirt road. We need to see them, stop for them, let them remind us that, for all the fallen nature of those who conspire to bring us down, there are paths through the dark woods to light.
Browning was not unaware of how dark the world could be, and much of what he wrote was sardonic, and ironic, a kind of contrast to what Pippa saw and felt, but only underscored the point.
If we live in times rocked by preoccupied, hysterical, self-interested, often shameless defiers of light and right, who glibly crash about, crushing what surrounds them, defiled not devout, that need not be the frame of reference we choose.
We can just as easily rise with a spring in our step, claiming our world as our own, determined to do what we can for others, but never lose our skip, or the skip of a stone. We define ourselves.
The lightness of the heart, like the sanctity of our mind, is within our reach, something no government can take away. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote, after years in a gulag, “The battle line between good and evil runs through the heart of every man,” and “A man is happy so long as he chooses to be happy, and nothing can stop him.”
So, next time the world bites your ankle rattles your peace, makes you shake your fist, or rankles you, just say to yourself, “Not me, not today, not going to bump me off my pace, not going to get into my zone. Where I live, there is hope, and joy, and a pair of figurative fawns.”
Or borrow from Browning’s Pippa, wisdom for the ages, we are more often than not what we choose to be, and more often than not can shape our destiny. Just say to yourself, “The lark’s on the wing; the snail’s on the thorn, and God’s in His heaven.” Imagine … and wonder.
Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman for AMAC.
