In remembrance of hope

We wake, pour coffee. It is raining & the deck is slippery with fallen leaves and fast advancing moss so we look out at the woods from indoors, a steady trickle today’s soundtrack. The fields are russet carpeted now, the trees half naked. The glorious cloth of autumn falls, an army of leaves having done their work now sacrificed to the cause of the trees' survival. The bones of things begin to show themselves.

Much has been revealed this year, eyes opened to truths, reluctant curtains of flesh ripped open to lay bare the devastation that festers beneath. In medicine if an infection is bone deep, there is nothing else for it but to lay open the wound, wash it clean, debride rotting flesh, administer antibiotics, and hope for the best. I am hopeful for America. I know there are painfully uncertain times ahead, that what has been won may prove troublesome in its own right. But still, I cannot help but feel that the wound is out in the open there. There seems a greater chance of healing.

We live in a country where the Prime Minister called me a piccaninny with a watermelon smile. Our area's Member of Parliament is a man who holds values as vile as any espoused by the outgoing American administration, merely presented dressed in Latin. This country birthed the American project, but when it did all that poisons both nations seems to have been buried deep beneath polite scarring, nation's head a pus filled abscess of apathy; how white the septic heart. Too many inhabit a hallucinatory delirium of noble goodness.

I look at the autumn leaves and in silence think of the fallen. Poppies for the blood of ancestors shipped off to fight in a war, lives sacrificed for our uneasy peace. What flowers shall I wear for those who gave their lives for our uneasy prosperity? What blooms for those who lie beneath the ocean’s depths, for those buried in too many unmarked, unremembered graves, for those whose blossoming lives are denied still? My children’s faces are the most beautiful flowers I know; I hug them tight, paint them with kisses, cover them with love.

The opposite of love is not hate. Hate is a perversion of love's passion, the fire burns but whether a warming cleanse or a destructive blaze depends on the spark of intent. The opposite of love is cynical indifference, a slow suffocation of all feeling. A suppression seemingly desirable, how stiff the smothering pillow of the lauded upper lip.

Mine is wet with rain and tears. We are all connected, and there are many to mourn. I am hopeful that as the season turns in America, so it shall here. I am hopeful that our bone deep healing will be collective. It must be; the cord has not been cut, blood shed is shared. We heal or die together.