As I walked to the bus this morning, I noticed that the butterflies are out today in great numbers! Splendid monarchs and delicate little white ones. I do not know what has been drawing my attention to the traces of nature in the city of late, but I have been greatly cheered by the sight of butterflies and of squirrels chasing each other across patches of grass, and especially by the chirping of birds both morning and evening. These are little touches that make life so beautiful, almost without our even noticing them. It was strange to pause and consider a world without life teeming everywhere. Even the daffodils are trumpeting the glory of the day from neighbours’ front lawns when I go out now. The delight of spring never grows old.
To my great surprise, there are no butterflies in my stomach as I face my exam in two days’ time! I have never been so good at managing my stress levels. It’s almost eery. There is, I find, no room for anxiety, however. There is too much beauty around me, lifting my gaze from my little worries.
Even the material I am reading seems to point me in the direction of recognizing the beauty of being alive. I confess I haven’t had to look very hard for that direction, since the medievals seem to have a worldview permeated with the perception of beauty and truth. For them, simply the colour white can be a reminder of some sort of joy beyond human comprehension. Everything has meaning; everything has direction. I wonder if the world today has quite had enough of its existential and nihilistic outlook. When I read the medievals, I taste a freedom that contemporary society seems to have forgotten. I’m not sighing over the “good old days,” for I can’t deny there were things wrong with medieval society as well, but I do think we could learn a thing or two from them about fostering a positive and truly humanist philosophy.
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My attention has recently been brought to Stella Marr’s blog. Earlier I had been looking for universal reasons to support my gut feeling that Ontario’s legal revisions regarding prostitution is a very bad move for Canadian citizens. Stella Marr (whose beautiful name reminds me of the Latin stella maris, meaning “star of the sea,” a title given by the medievals to their Queen, the Virgin Mary) is able to give the most acerbic reasons against legally enabling prostitution, for she escaped from the world ten years ago. A beautiful and educated woman, she has made it her mission to speak out against this horrifying abuse of humanity and sexuality. When you read her story, any traces of sympathy the rhetoric of Terri-Jean Bedford & Co. might have evoked are instantly shattered. Their attempts to put a fair face on the world of prostitution is, as we all suspected, an elaborate deception: it’s bad and it’s ugly. I am deeply saddened by Ontario’s decision to turn a blind eye and a deaf ear upon the cries of the weak, the vulnerable, and the inevitably exploited.
Yet there is hope. Stella’s story shows that evil does not conquer and that humanity is capable of good. What it also points out is that we must fight for the good. We must fight for truth. As it has been said before, All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
Reluctant Scholar 