Munching, morphing, mating

The leaves on my oak are tattered and full of holes. A brief examination of a low-hanging branch reveals worms curled up on the undersides of the tender (when else are oak leaves ever tender?) leaves, ready to chew. My pear has already been ravaged and my plum is under assault. My neighbor down the street is appalled by the many large hairy caterpillars in his yard (though not the same kind as on my trees, I think.)

The strategy is brilliant: eggs hatch as the buds open, the harvest and the harvester appear simultaneously. The neonate eats the nascent. Those green and striped oakworm caterpillars that survive will change in a few weeks into brown moths which will lay more eggs (a process I've never seen). Oakworms and oaks: how long has this been going on?  The oak's environment is the sky, albeit its lower reaches; the oakworm's, just the rough bark and spiky twigs of this black oak, munching, morphing, mating, a life of what I might call limited aspiration.

At least compared to mine, which is to add something to humanity's conversation on the meaning of life, and incidentally to live a life I can recommend to others; to teach (what else, oh pedagogue) many; to be part of a community inspired by God-in-love principles; to travel, debate, write brilliant things, even poetry;  to experience, as my grandson does when I toss him around, things in their depth and breadth, and help others experience life similarly.

Except that sometimes I feel the intensity of this aspiration wane, its clarity go out of focus. Why am I writing this blog? What's the point? Am I really seeing  things differently?  Acting differently? Is God-in-love becoming for me 'overwhelming real, shatteringly present' as Abraham Heschel says Yahweh was to the Hebrew prophets. Am I, in the words of Robert Frost, really one of those people 'who see life large'?

I met recently a person who, with his family, has spent years caring for a disabled child, now a grown person who is affectionate, capable of gesture, appreciative of the outdoors, yet with limited ability to communicate and requiring constant attention. What's the aspiration implicit in this commitment? There's necessarily regularity and repetition in such a life, limitation in fact, yet it implies vastnesses. Love here is perhaps a sufficient framework for an account of the meaning of life. What need of philosophy, much less revelations and epiphanies?

I have much to learn from those who labor in love, from God-struck prophets, perhaps even from the oakworm. To feel uncomfortable and antsy is not necessarily to be off-track. Let me think.