THE PSALM OF CREATION It is beauty fading. It is loss. It is silence at noon. The turning face of a flower.

It is the magical thread of the spider spinning in mid-air. And the world is held by a spun thread of gossamer, fragile, vulnerable and shining, broken by a touch and spun again in an instant. This softness, this spinning, this holding is our world. It is the hard heart of the wind. The shift of a leaf falling. A listening tree. A tiny bird dancing in the grass. The knowledge of insects. The dying of the thing you love. The loose end and the held end. The moment the bee goes home. The instant before something happens. It kills at a blow or feeds for all time something with no merit and no meaning. It is beauty dying of rapture. It is vengeance waiting. It is the smell of home. It does not have our feelings: nice, hate, fear, sorry; it is too big for that. It is the law that has no law. The law of Creation. We are in it like beetles in sap. We are stuck. Its pride is in slowness, its strength is in waiting. Again and again it lies in wait at the same corner to strike again and again at the same wound. Repeating, copying, never the same. It knows only the truth of its own nature. Because its nature is truth. To know this truth you must know yourself. And even then you know nothing, because it has one thing we cannot understand. It has an enormous idea. And the idea is perfect. Everything fits everything else so everything works right. It cannot make a mistake. It holds us in its quiet hand gently. It is the law of the universe. The softness that runs Creation.