Spring Clouds

There's a real for need for optimism. True honest optimism. I think the Earth feels it. It expresses it. The daffodils, now buried again under a foot of new snow, feel it. The very existence of optimism proves its own need, I think. It came from this Earth, it is of this Earth. Some say the ideas we carry are of our mind only. I'm with Owen Barfield who reminds us that meaning can really only emerge in a meaningful universe. Pattern, metaphor, even language. It all has roots. It all begins in the soil. In Washington, these unrooted men and women operate from a position of non-optimism. Their pragmatism and hunger for power requires fear. You must be afraid. You must feel that you need them. George Bush calls himself a Christian yet he wouldn't know Christian humility if it turned the other cheek on him. We need optimism, expressions of our best selves, virtue.

The daffodils, safely insulated from yesterday's arctic air under one foot of fresh snow. The mist of Tuesday morning slowly let loose into a steady rain, whose heavy drops grew more and more crystaline over the course of an hour before a full fledged snow storm was underway. The wind picked up, the snow continued to come down through the afternoon and into the evening, laying the soft blanket of silence atop everything. Me in my little station wagon trying to make it home along route 117, stopped multiple times by the shear force of the wind and snow. I was a gnat against a howling wind. I stopped and waited to see, laughing with delight at the shear totality of force mustered up by our climate. I read Herodotus in early graduate school. He was the last of the mythical historians, we were told, because he still talked about gods as if they were forces of history. Then a close reading of the the text showed all god-like acts to be in the form of floods, or torrents, or storms of all sorts. Herodotus talked about Nature and Earth as forces of history, I concluded, and merely used the language of gods to set the narrative. Do we do the same today? The storm reminded me how similar the experiences of the forces of nature have been over the epochs. Will we ever find out higher selves there?