Monday Blues

It's most decidedly not the fact that the sky has been holding this flat gray light for hours since daybreak. No. It's not the cold that lingers despite being the last day of February. It's not even the forecasted snow coming in tonight. Each peaceful piece of this grayish and slow Monday has no bearing, it seems, on the carnage we've wrought. Gray is not murder. Laying the groundwork for civil war, that is. As I motored along route 117 this morning trying to find depth of color, or some sign that this day would somehow turn more magical, the word came of a suicide bomb in Iraq. 100 plus killed. We waited to build security until the very process of building security could be sabotaged. I do not mean to say the bombers are right. I mean to say, we knew how wrong they were and then left the whole flank of civil Iraq open to their terror. Rumsfeld did this in his arrogant opposition to Army war plans. Rumsfeld made this war and made it more terrible than it even had to be. For the first he should be tried for war crimes, for the second, he will have to face his own conscience, if ever he finds one.

The sun breaks now and again, lighting the crystalized snow cover, casting silhouettes of dogwood and Norway maple, opening the open forest to pattern and depth. I see sap coloring the buds, bark creeping ever outward and inward to support its own weight. I see wisdom in the trees, logic and truth. It is not the gray day that makes me sorry. Nor the leafless trees nor proto-spring nor cold air or the flat color of Earth today. It is these men who haven't seen this truth undermining hope across the globe. They are who wear me down. Beware of too much principle, said the preacher yesterday, and too much righteousness. Humility is the way of things.