Musing

 Navigating the February Leap Year 

A favorite X follow @OurShallowState begins his posts rather like this:

“Good morning, there are blue skies, my dog is a very good boy. The snow is melting…” and then curates the day & events, posting analyses & observations. I may have to nic that first paragraph. It invites me and maybe us into relationship and oddly, conversation. I admire how he applies deep knowledge & relates it in so many aspects of our lives, actually.

So for tonight, 27th day of a Leap Year, political news junkie that I am, here are some things from today waking up in me about moving thru life right now: 

In this evening when the sun begins to glow low on the western horizon, when I fix dinner and absorb the news of the day as best and thoroughly as I can, Gunnar is a very good boy. I have managed to avoid falling on the ice, and there are swaths of green for now, appearing thru the melt. 

The SAVE Act is dead, with a nod to Majority Leader Senator John Thune for that (not ditching the filibuster). Hon James Walkinshaw (D-VA) is amazing. Big media mergers/buyouts are in question (goal for oligarchs' control of narrative up to midterms?), and Epstein. Epstein. Epstein. The courts are holding. John Roberts is up to bat again soon. We are assaulted every single day with issues that DEMAND our attention, our visceral learning, our self-reflection. 

I’ve taken many a beating for my untamable optimism. Can’t help it, I’m wired this way. My wiring has gotten pretty frayed and stretched, but some days I’m able to encapsulate feelings for the day, just not everything of course. I find scaling back what I can take in makes room for my reaching up to that notion of hope a bit. Find nuggets of hope in the wildness, and therein find some calm and equanimity amid the swirling landscape.  I sleep better with hope. 

Gunnar is the best boy. We’ll get more chickens in the spring. I fancy I’m soon to start looking out to my barn beds for the first peep of daffodils. 

~2-27-26

Dark Sunday Light

 If I don’t care about sides

I’ll see what’s in front of me 

Light a candle in the wind

Flicker, flow, grow, blow out 

Earth always the sextant. 

I said this to myself: 

Begin unburdening now, 

And when the 

Clearing lightens, 

Your wings are stronger. 

And Almost

In early November

This old place is so alive. 

I recall long ago another 

November alchemy, 

When I drove into the slumbering

Meadows flowing from the Hector Backbone

Late, on a night searching for my

Beating heart, 

And now I’m understanding 

What I never knew 

In the molecules of every day, 

Home from the vast night skies of the forest

It is everywhere, in a thousand thousand acres, 

This pulse and breathing, into the 

Necessary interstitial pausing. 

Squirrels hide sustenance under 

The sheets on a guest room bed in this old place—

They have their ways 

And critters in the walls scamper busy, tho

No bird nest builders in the cornices 

Now this season come.

The garden sleeping, 

Bulbed, and rooted deep and 

When I pause I feel our breathing 

We are earthing, fragile passages of time and 

Mine in time as well,

Japanese maple finally drifting leaves red and 

Verdant to the ground

And still, you see, while all not quite into the deep,

I verge on winter. 

Here We Are, I Am

 Wondering this day, 9-11, 

How one deals with shock? 

We tried, as a nation. 

We’re trying now. 

We’re trying as each precious

One of us is trying 

To find the equilibrium.

Bonnie Raitt & Allison Krauss

 https://youtu.be/DZki0PkSgAs?si=WWAQrpUjBAzVeDv7

Woman in a Meadow

Her balm the in-between, 

The interstitials

And somewhere out in the 

Great Plains and the divide, 

Great opening spaces, in

The small meadows she created

I find her

All the Light I Cannot See

Spent all day in the big outside

Mowing into the glory of the clover

Fretting about apple trees’ vigor,

Though they’re old, 

Making sure in my reveries

I kept respectful distance from the 

Pond’s banks 

No tilting in too far, and 

Surprise of 

Wiping tears away

Weeping 

For the kindness, the 

Constancy, and 

Understanding; 

I had to shade my eyes now and then

From a lowering sun, the 

Chords of knowing blinding

Into the precious new again, that 

Some things never change. 

Coming in

To cook up all that

Emotional

Psychic

Visceral

Logical 

Incoming,

I turn to dinner 

Yesterday my friend gave me a bounty of 

Butternut squash soup, 

She said, he doesn’t like it 

And if I had to guess 

I bet it comes from 

The church ladies; an 

Excellent base 

And then the riot:

Mine here, in no order—

Two evenings’ soups

Beets and pesto 

Cream, some honey and 

Black beans

Paprika, and some cheese

And snips of basil, parsleys from

my kitchen garden, 

My way of finding 

Balance