I Know Not the Gods, But I Know of Their Sweetness (Email Version)
Where the Gods Fall Silent and Humanity Begins
I wrote this in a moment of uneasy peace, that thin hour when despair and wonder both demand your attention. It isn’t a sermon or an argument, but a kind of reckoning. I’ve spent a lifetime trying to reconcile the beauty I see with the cruelty I know, to understand how the same hands that plant can also destroy. I don’t claim belief, yet I can’t escape reverence. Whatever name you give the pulse that moves through the world, God, nature, love, accident, this piece is my offering to it. Not worship, but witness. Not faith, but recognition.
I know not the gods,
but I know of their sweetness.
If they ever shaped us,
they left their work unfinished,
flawed,
and dangerous.
I see man clawing at the soil
until it bleeds,
scarring mountains for profit,
poisoning rivers until they choke.
I see his hands eager for weapons,
his mouth hungry for lies,
his eyes quick to hate,
the neighbor who looks like a stranger.
He has carved altars from corpses,
crowned tyrants with cheers,
and built monuments from bones.
The innocent fall before him,
as though they were no more than leaves,
tossed into fire.
His cruelty is casual,
his greed without bottom,
his thirst for blood unquenchable.
If gods once dreamed this species,
they must have awakened in horror,
shattered the clay,
and turned away.
Perhaps they wander the stars,
penitents seeking absolution
for their arrogance.
Or perhaps they never were,
and the silence above
is nothing but silence,
eternal and indifferent.
And yet the silence is not empty.
It carries the salt of the sea
into my lungs,
cool and bracing.
It lifts the scent of pine,
through the mountain air,
sharp and unyielding.
It scatters fire across the night sky,
a jeweled canopy,
that no tyrant can claim.
Even in the wreckage man creates,
the earth continues its hymn.
The crash of a bear through the thicket,
terrible and alive. The near-weightless miracle
of a butterfly settling upon my hand,
these are revelations.
They belong to no empire,
no army,
no flag.
A lover’s whisper,
trembling against my ear.
The milk-sweet cry of a child
pulling air into untested lungs.
The sudden perfume of rain after drought.
All of it untouched
by the black hunger of man,
all of it resisting his ruin.
And I wonder.
Is this divinity speaking in thunder and in tenderness, or only the strict unfolding of nature’s law? Is the beauty of a sunset proof of gods, or only the mathematics of light scattered in air? Science measures, maps, divides, it tells me how, but never why.
It can split the atom,
weigh the stars,
chart the genome,
but it cannot explain why
basil crushed between fingers
can summon tears,
why a song drifting from a window
can halt the body,
why grief and beauty arrive
braided together,
like strands of the same rope.
Perhaps there are no gods.
Perhaps there were,
and they abandoned us.
But still the sweetness remains.
So I return to my beginning.
I know not the gods.
But I know of their sweetness.
If it is their breath I feel in the wind,
let it move nameless through me.
If it is only nature,
let it be enough.
For I have seen what man destroys,
but I have also seen what he cannot touch.
Yes, his empires still rise
on the backs of the broken,
his tyrants still march prisoners
into camps,
his hunger still starves children
while granaries overflow,
his factories still spill poison
into rivers,
until fish float belly-up in silence.
But over and against his ruin,
the seas keep rising.
The stars keep burning.
The children keep laughing.
And in what endures,
I glimpse something greater than myself.
Call it divine.
Call it natural.
Call it only the extravagant mystery of being.
It is enough.
Even if the gods have forsaken us,
their sweetness remains,
their sweetness resists,
their sweetness lingers still,
like honey upon the tongue of the earth.
When I read these words again, I don’t hear defiance so much as relief. I think we spend our lives searching for something vast enough to hold both our grief and our gratitude, and maybe this is what the ancients meant by gods. I don’t need marble temples or miracles anymore. I just need the sound of the wind moving through the pines, the way a child’s laughter can still cut through the noise, the way light keeps finding its way through the cracks. That’s enough divinity for one life. And if that sweetness is all that remains, it’s still enough to live by.
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