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WE are all akin to the
solitary tree, braving the storm upon a barren hill; and in every human
heart, at some time, echoes the sad cry of drifting gulls, the hunger of
desolate places.
And yet none of us, childless or friendless though we may be in the eyes
of the world, need ever be alone. For the same life which beats through
all living and lonely things beats through us also, giving us breath and
being. Not only are we brothers, would we or no, with each other -- with
the poorest, dirtiest beggar tramping the white roads, or the darkest
savage catching all poetry in the flashing curve of a spear -- but an
integral part of the central core of life which moves and directs all
things to a predestined end.
What that end may be, we can only dimly imagine; and, with all our
so-called learning we are no nearer to solving, this than the sunflower to
comprehending the tremendous enigma of the sun. It may well be that we are
farther away. For all too often we become enamoured of this fleeting day
we call our life, or this little plot we call our land, seeing our own
existence as an end in itself, and forgetting that, as the atom to the
substance, we are only an infinitesimal part of a Whole whose nature and
purpose we have hardly begun to understand. We are born, we live, we die.
As the dust, we are blown away on the winds of time-and who knows why or
wherefore?
Only we ourselves, when we dare to think about it, will acknowledge that
we are nearest to ultimate beauty in those brief moments when we feel and
recognise our brotherhood with our fellow-beings of all races and creeds,
and our unalterable kinship with the glories of Nature, which belong
equally to us all. The open sky and the quiet stars-the swelling moors and
lush green meadows which we hold in trust for those who will follow after.
Then, indeed, can we exult in our common heritage, crying, with the voices
of prophets, “Open your eyes and look up, you disconsolate and needy of
all the earth! For the clouds roll away, and the light of new day quivers
upon the calm face of the sea. Let us, therefore, join hands in spirit
with the eternal beauty of which we are forever a part, and walk as
brothers out of the valley of darkness and despair into the hills of love
and light."
Cromarty Firth, Near Dingwall |
