This morning, the sky over Asheville was clear and blue, with a few bright white cottony clouds. The air was cool; there was a mostly gentle, sometimes brisk, breeze. Walking in downtown was a pleasure.

I resisted, as I’m trying to do lately, immediately poking AirPods in my ears to listen to a podcast or to music. I wanted to hear the laughter of children and the barks of dogs and the sounds of conversation in the weekly market; to take in snippets of chatter as I walked past folks seated at sidewalk tables enjoying breakfast; and to say “Good mornin’” to people when our eyes met.

I made a quick stop at Pack Library and found among the newish books a memoir by Gail Godwin called Getting to Know Death: A Memoir. Godwin is now in her mid-eighties, and it was a fall in her garden which jeopardized her health seriously enough to bring death more starkly into her view.  I also picked up a copy of the weekly Mountain Express which featured a cover story about the lack of Foster Care placement possibilities for children in our region. The picture on the cover was of a young girl standing next to a brown suitcase with a teddy bear resting on it. Old and young—all of us, really—have times when we long for a quality of life and a sheltering home we don’t fully have.

There’s a wonderful vegetarian restaurant here called Laughing Seed, which is closing today after 32 years in business. When I walked past it just before it opened for lunch, there was a very long line of customers, wanting, I’m guessing, not just to eat there one more time, but to say “thank you.”

I saw a bride and her father walking toward the entrance to a downtown church and could hear through the open door the swelling of the organ. The wedding and a new season in life were about to begin.

After my walk, I sat on a bench near City Hall to read a few stories from online versions of The Atlantic and The New York Times. The news punctured—as I knew it would—the reverie I had entered as I walked and the fellow-feeling I had with others on the streets of this lovely town, still struggling to recover from a destructive hurricane last fall. How could it be otherwise? There is so much grift and graft among some political leaders, especially the President, and so much capriciousness and callousness toward those who live, the vast majority for reasons not of their own doing, in poverty and in dependence upon a safety net that is being shredded.

Both the beauty of the morning and the disturbing news are part of the “real world.” I choose to trust, however falteringly, that the really real world is the world Jesus announced and enacted: a world of justice and peace, of beauty and goodness, of truth and tenderness, of love and mercy. It’s possible that I am naïve. It feels, instead, like I am clinging, desperately and hopefully, to a promise made sure by the resurrection: creation comes from chaos and life from death.