Dear Wigleaf,

I'm sitting in the chair where I write, looking through the window at a patch of dirt I'm late tilling. Last year's garden was a goddamned disaster. The cabbageworm moths were relentless, the Japanese beetles like a plague sent from Moses. Once they infest your beds and bushes, the only response is equally biblical—to catch their young where they gestate, and kill them without mercy. Next week I'll begin releasing lacewings, which devour aphids like lions in the arena.

A wholesale slaughter must happen for any of us to be fed.

I heard it again recently, the saying that the definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting a different result. I used to nod along with everyone else when I heard this, but lately I've been thinking it's a lie. Every morning I write, in hopes of crafting something true and good and lovely. Every night I pray with my children, that some of the viciousness of this world might be abated. When they are asleep, I pray a more desperate prayer: that they be spared the worst this world has to offer, find their right ways, and know peace.

And if I'm being honest in this little postcard between us, I don't know if any of it will make a difference.

My life is governed by hours and seasons, and I move within them as a liturgy. Is it insanity, to do this over and over in hope of a different outcome, which is to say a world just a little better than this one?

Friends, I do not know. But I want to believe the conventional wisdom is wrong, that careening from activity to activity in hopes of a different outcome is the greatest madness of all, because what really changes this world is not clever mania but steadfastness. Stubborn, unyielding ritual—pen to page by a dawn-lit window, seeds spread over broken soil, evening prayers with children who believe the kingdom of heaven belongs to them.

Let me know how you're getting by.

Wells




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Read his story.

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