The wonder is – given the errant nature of freedom and the burgeoning of texture in time – the wonder is that all the forms are not monsters, that there is beauty at all, grace gratuitous, pennies found, like mockingbird’s free fall. Beauty itself is the fruit of the creator’s exuberance that grew such a tangle, and the grotesques and horrors bloom from that same free growth, that intricate scramble and twine up and down the conditions of time.
This then is the extravagant landscape of the world, given, given with pizzazz, given in good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over.
Annie Dillard, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,” 1974
