Wednesday, December 31st

THE YEAR is ending in peace … soft air … an angelic pale blue sea, breathing a long breath as the waves hush-hush against the rocks. And I feel greatly blessed. It still seems a miracle that I ever landed here. What if Bev and Mary-Leigh had not turned up that day in Nelson when I was so low and suggested that I think about a big move?

Yesterday while a brief snow drifted down, and I was lighting the candles and the fire in the library for Caroline Cadwalader and her daughter, who were on their way to drink a glass of champagne—my last guests before the tree comes down—the florist arrived with a big bundle. What could it be? Chrysanthemums? When I opened it, out fell dozens of brilliant red and red-and-white tulips and three branches of mimosa! It really was magic—a thought from a friend three thousand miles away turned into spring here in the snow. I was transported for a few moments into a kind of ecstasy.

It made me run upstairs and reread Vincent Hepp’s Christmas word, accompanying a card, a Japanese water-color of sparrows on bamboo. He says,

“I send you these sparrows, thinking with Thornton Wilder and probably without Jacques Monod, that ‘they do not lose a feather that is not brushed away by the finger of God,’ and I wish you a happy feast of Christmas, with a recapture of this great sense of the meaningfulness of our lives, an enormous meaning, we are told, yet seldom obvious. Enormous or not, life is made of small things, small happinesses chained like daisies, one by one. Let the next year be such a chain for you.”

Yet “Joy and woe are woven fine/in the human soul divine,” and I woke this morning in tears, thinking about a TV film I had to stop looking at because it was so painful, a stab to the heart, as I saw Japanese murdering hundreds of porpoises … as we too are doing every day in the tuna nets … the terrible image of man at his most cruel and devastating, his ability to rid the universe of one marvelous creation after another. Porpoises, so gentle, the friends of man! There are times when it seems unbearable to be part of this horrible race, mankind, the destroyers, the murderers of everything gentle and helpless. That is what we are. And, in the end, of course, the self-destroyers.