It looks so pretty, and I am so very proud of it.... My new workstation sits in the corner of the sitting kitchen where my old government surplus table and hard chair used to be. It has been made abundantly clear to me in recent weeks that I have to take my back problems seriously Or Else. So I got a couple of Ikea bookcase unit thingies that could, with a little cleverness, form an Ergonomically Correct computer table and storage unit. My boss gave me a very good office chair, and I bought a little rag mat to go under the chair. I have put it together hung my dogwood cross and compass rose at each side of the monitor. Since the unit is pine, it glows softly in lamplight. It looks very nice.

And it is tidy. I believe I have remarked on the fact that my house is less than perfectly neat. My old table was a mess, largely because it had no storage space. My new unit has books neatly stacked and a file holder, and a place for CDs, and drawers and shelves for things, and I mean to keep it neat.

Strangely enough, once I got my work space cleared up, a small tide of orderliness went wafting through the house, almost without my will or obvious effort. The dining room sideboard isn't exactly swept bare of stuff, but some of the wood is showing. I spent a couple of minutes with my younger son clearing up that messy corner of the upstairs back hallway. I still haven't tackled any closets (can't, anyway, until my current physical problem is resolved) or sorted paperwork, but the stack of stuff on the sitting kitchen table is visibly quite a lot smaller.

It's funny. One side of the human spirit--it claims to be realism (which it contrasts with "starry-eyed illusions") tends to see disorder/chaos/darkness/wrongness as an incoming tide. There were the Good Old Days, but they are gone, and everything's been going to hell in a hand basket ever since. Licking its lips, this side points to everything that's wrong in life and says that the wrong is clearly increasing, like a cancer metastasizing through the body. Easy to see where this comes from. There's a nihilistic streak to the best of us--look at our obsession with illicit sex, for example, or our love of slasher films or our fascination with disaster. This is the doomsayer side, wrapped with equal ease in sophisticated post-modern vinyl or in thundering "righteous indignation" sober black serge. For both, Wrong is on the rise; one claims that God has already lost, and the other feels that God certainly needs their intervention to point out Sin to everyone in earshot. Which is not exactly complimentary to God, if you think of it.

Another side, led by the mystics, sees goodness, wholeness, integration as growing steadily and quietly, spreading with great power and gentleness throughout our lives. Think of a landscape after a forest fire, or a bombed city. Life re-colonizes, first the hardy opportunists like plantain and dandelions, lichens and mosses, finding niches to grow and thrive and reproduce, then other plants and trees moving in, re-seeding, re-creating a new ecosystem. Think of the human spirit in the process of recovery from trauma, if it chooses the path of healing--struggling up from pain into normalcy, walking out of the desert, overcoming old pain and disorder....Was it Jung who held that the unconscious moves powerfully and inexorably toward health and wholeness?

The struggle is within each of us, of course: between despair and hope, between narcissism and the drive to become truly human, between inertia and growth, between selfishness and love. I know it's wrong to divide humankind up into categories, but it is my experience that some people end up quite clearly on one side of that divide, and others end up on the other.

I'll stick with the side that says goodness and growth are going to win--probably because you can't live in the country without seeing the sheer naturalness of growth and life, beauty always managing to recover and re-invade. But also because I have come to believe that Good is more powerful than Evil, more contagious, ultimately more persuasive. And that is because I believe that God is indeed a God of power, a power capable of breaking the nihilism of Death, even Christ's death on the Cross.

It may take more time than I can imagine--maybe eons. But God has already won. It's only time until Julian's words are proved truer than even she could imagine: "all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of thing will be well."