This is a summer of waiting for Godot.  There is amongst the participants of this democracy a certain tension in the air.  We are in an election year where the narrative has set our worlds on edge and as the stakes teeter this way and that we cringe, grind, and groan.  I read the papers, but only headlines sometimes because occasionally I lack the courage that particular morning for the detail. I often look around in a restaurant and wonder: Can half these people be so different than I that they may belong to an alien species?

The answer comes when I apply my rational mind to the irrational political narrative soup in which I swim this season. The answer for me is no, we are still but one species. I continue the work to put out these posts because of my belief if we all had spent 2024 so far discussing the joy of children, the wonder of a well tuned engine after one month of yoga like moves over a car, the pleasures of a good family meal, the easy beauty of a walk in a public park, or the staggering majesty of our National Parks, we would still be eating around one table talking reasonably about our differences. I choose to work on the word ‘good’ because the commonweal of shared good could tie us back together from top to bottom and in doing so save us from our self-imposed toxic ways.