I sense a bad news exhaustion in myself as well as readers. Writing bad news in bold lettering does little to nothing to counter the bad news of this day. The new AI enhanced cartoons about the current leaders are sufficient at best for a smoldering chuckle before one realizes you only feel worse for the short laugh and even less powerful.  So this project will experiment with changing gears for a little while. Crushing defeat is not a motivator.

This is a nation dealing with epidemic grief.  Grief is an equal opportunity process that spares no one.  Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is a fearless poet who has experienced grief with stark directness and stepped right into the hard demands of grief’s work.  So many of us are struggling with an undefined grief so let’s start there. These short excerpts of a poem entitled “Toward Peace” are from her book called; The Unfolding Poems; an excellent and beautiful collection of reflections on grief

Toward Peace

Perhaps some part of me still believes

peace is a destination

a place we arrive ideally together . . .

.. . . Meanwhile this invitation

to live in the tangle of fear and failure

to be humbled by my own inner wars

and wander how to find a living peace

right here, the peace that arrives

when we take just one step through the mess

toward compassion and notice

as our foot rises, our heart also rises

and in that lifted moment

still scraping along in the dirt

there is a peace so real we become light

become the momentum that is the change.

A Modest Proposal for Good

In this period of deep losses we need to find ways to stay strong before the compulsion and rigidity of violence seem the only way forward.  The above poem talks about the single step into the mess and ‘the mess’ will instruct on the next steps.  The Sense of Good is the light-of-heart that comes with the first step toward restoring justice in our land.  But in these darker days, a little light may be all we have to find the momentum of change toward the next thing.  Don’t look back only to become a pillar of salt. Collective diminutive illuminations will get us through to the next ‘good’. The community local and in-our-faces represents the only power sufficient to turn this around.