Surviving Donald

I'm writing this from inside my bubble where I live with my closest friends and family striving for enhanced normalcy. We daily supply oxygen for each other which keeps us from going numb.

During this seismic reign of terror tectonic plates have shifted. Uttering his name has me gagging so much I require three Heimlich maneuvers to expel the syllables. It feels as if we, along with seventy-five million others, have been locked inside the trunk of car as it is going over a cliff in slo-mo.

Universities have been pillaged. Laboratories, shuttered. Language, degraded. Civility, mocked. Founding documents, scraped.

Yet outside the window I'm blessed with many non-deciduous trees. Green leaves are clinging with the same tenacity my circle of friends hold to a belief that the mind of spring will return us to saner times.

Here I am at the breakfast table enjoying the yellow-orange tulips bursting their incandescence as the dry bulbs are quenched by Handel’s Water Music.

The table is filled with glass and bowl, cup and plate, grains and berries with boxes in a spectrum of colors. Rembrandt might find a pattern in the jumble the way Rauschenberg would see it as collage or Pollack might give it a splatter with a yellow streak. It was all invisible to me until just now. Thank you for that, Donald.

In my Trump-free state I am listening to a Julian Barnes book being read via audible from the library, but interest is waning over Flaubert's Parrot. 

I should also know the names of birds. Then I could report which one it was that just chased away a crow four times its size. I suppose the natural state of Nature is strife. The hummingbird is constantly darting away from predators. Does the cut worm forgive the plow? Adversity drives adaptation. The bough struggles for a sliver of sun, not unlike us in the bubble, listening hard for that sweet sound of grace.

At the same time, I bow to those at the barricades. Resistance is exhausting but so is it exhilarating and sometimes, as now, necessary. They are my proxy as I write. This page is written on my perch not far from the fray.