Chance = Change

Perhaps it's because I have lived 60 years that my subtle happiness at seeing the first snows of Winter fills me with something like hope.....or makes me think of the freshly baked pie in a grandmother's kitchen...maybe it's because I've grown tired, really just tired of so much disappointment the world has to offer , that a fresh white untouched snowfall makes me believe in possibility again...that old thing about after the snows comes Spring.....after the longed-for sleep of Winter, maybe I'll feel like a fresh daffodil again one day...and like daffodils in the ground, maybe I'll have increased and naturalized onto a larger stretch of green meadow....

I am a fortunate person.  I have known love from the very first day of my life, when a mother and father worshipped my very being....I have known men who love me, a career that has satisfied me, creativity that kindles me, and vision that makes me dream still...

But the world of men...the shabby world of poor, mistaken humans....the misery that sheer greed has created in the world today...thousands of jobs lost, stock markets at an historic low, people not only starving but having no means with which to go to doctors for their health, people losing their way, and our country committing to yet more years of a useless war in Iraq...it just baffles me...there is much I do not know about how the world works, and the newspapers are filled with nothing but varied points of view...no one really knows what motivates the decision makers to behave as they do...we assume they act in our best interests, but they probably do not...wouldn't it be swell if they did? Wouldn't it be really great for us all, if these dim, shadowy men (and a couple of women...God knows how they got there!) actually did care about what happens to this country instead of the welfare of the corporations that butter their bread...I have become cynical.

This past Presidential election raised my hopes of course - as it raised the hopes of so many - because for the first time in a while , it felt like our votes actually mattered!  Barack Obama was elected : the first President of color in our country's history, and a man who looks like he's not stupid, a man who looks like he truly cares about others.  And I re-iterate: a man who looks like he has a clue! Despite the Doomsday right -wing's belief, the Apocalypse seems postponed for a little while anyway....

 However, day after day ( as this gentle white snow falls to wipe away our sins), the world picture gets bleeker.... the world seems more and more at its wits' end.

Sometimes, as I read the morning news, or listen to CNN, it seems like there are no more adults in the world anymore...no more parents who know better than we do...no more guides to our future.  Because, finally, (I guess the inevitability of age) we realize we are the parents now...and, oops! We forgot to find out how to be good ones!  We forgot to ask what to do when it became out turn! And so the world wags...children stumbling in the dark of a house where the light bill did not get paid on time.

The snow keeps falling.  Hurry , Thanksgiving,  and give us that pie-filled kitchen soon...and please, world, give us something to be astonishinged by!  Thankful for... like, maybe, the ability to believe in and trust , at least for one more year?  The reminder that excitement and anticipation could possibly yield wonderful things, not the grey disappointment of a failing world.