For a couple of days after the occurrence of major political and social disasters that were the impeachment trial and the Iowa caucuses, these capping weeks and month, years really, of movement toward the final steps in killing off what was left of democracy, I abandoned FB and tried to turn my attention to happier things. I thought maybe, if I could just stop involving myself in the discussion, I would not be so disappointed in the discussion so as to feel that there was absolutely not hope in moving from this very bad place to something better.

In those two days I worked on a book and turned my attention to “building my own garden,” well, not really my own but the garden that is the youth program at Galena Creek. I got some work done! But why book or Galena Creek, even if successful, if there would be nothing left to which the good work could be attached?  Day three of withdrawal came and I felt even more helpless and hopeless than I did before I attempted to detach.   

Can’t do with and cannot do without.  That is, I hate the current circumstances and do not find the current conversation to be very helpful in changing the conditions that have brought about the current reality.  I am puddle jumping, trying to find the one with fresh clean water and finding none that are not of toxic sludge.  I should, as the saying goes, “get a life.”  But, when I try, I find, over and over again, that to do so, in the spirit of how it is meant, that the real life that is here to be lived now, honestly, in the context of the current reality, is a rather hopeless life, the light at the end of the tunnel non-existent because that light is so weak as to make it seem impossible to see the way clear to anything resembling meaningful change.

Yes, there are the kids at Galena and there is the Galena forest and my kids and friends, most of whom are dogs, and those hawks that are so magnificent and quantum physics—I am trying to understand that world because, perhaps, the answers are there, smaller than molecules, behaving as none could ever have expected them to do, the particles of which all is made, doing strange dances, magnificent minds trying to interpret what they mean…  But all for naught if there is no path to their salvation, if all of that is going to go up in smoke if we do not fix things on this particle level…

So, I have decided to continue blowing my own smoke, commenting on the impossible possible that is our current reality and offering up my own understanding of the situation and my own impossible solutions for no other reason than I find there to be nothing else to do, no other way to cope.

I invite people to ignore me.  This has become another bout of me speaking to myself, the goal some kind of clarity, never to be achieved, that might have the effect of infecting another, maybe a few who might wish to converse honestly about what is and how to find which tunnel really leads to light and maybe propose some ways for making it possible to get there or even find reason to dream of the possibility of getting there.