SO LONG

Dear Friends,

I just wanted to let you know that I am giving up this blogging, this time for good. I am tired of paying attention to politics. I only started doing it because I, like many of you I'm sure, wanted to raise my tiny little voice against the fascism of the Bush/Cheney years. Hopefully, in the election tomorrow, things will change and the country and the world will recover and endure. This is my fervent wish.

But I am getting too old to waste my remaining time listening to the self-righteous blather of the 300 million egomaniacal yaketyyaks that make up this country. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but I am entitled to put on my ear protectors, rev up the chainsaw and drown the bastards out. It's nothing but hatred and nonsense and I'm sick to death of it.

I've been spending most of my time "out in the nature" as they say around here and I much prefer it to politics and punditry. A week ago a friend helped me take down a 100-year-old ash tree in the back yard. Many, many years ago, at least back to the 70's, someone had girdled this tree with clothesline wire. The wire was embedded deep in the wood now, literally choking the tree and depriving it of it's needed water and nutrients. It was dying, so down it came.

I was out stacking the wood from this tree this afternoon. There were a dozen huge cross-sectional chunks, two-and-a-half to three feet in diameter. I couldn't lift them, but I managed to roll them to the spot where I was going to stack. It was a gentle downslope all the way and I rolled them with my foot. It was much fun, like playing. They smelled beautiful too. Then the dusk came on quickly and surprised me because of the return to "standard time". A beautiful waxing crescent of a moon grew brighter in the south as the light died and, above it, there was the evening star, which is not a star at all, of course, but a planet. The planet of love was trailing the liberal crescent. The air grew crisp and the moon was bathed in a misty aura. It was too cool for school.

I was tired and there were scratches all over my forearms from manhandling these beastly chunks of ash. I went into the house and got a beer and came back outside and sat on one of the chunks that was only there to sit on now because someone, back in the 70's, had washed their clothes and needed a place to hang them to dry and had no thoughts to what their clothesline would be doing to the tree. I sat and watched the sky in the south, gazing at the beautiful Moon and the beautiful Venus.

Perhaps there was hope yet for our own planet. After bailing out all of the incompetent, lying, usurious, greedy shitholes who have dishonored our world but don't have the grace to fall on their own swords maybe, just maybe, there is enough left of the shattered spirit of human decency and kindness to rebuild on.

There is an old willow here, below the line of oaks on the edge of the swampland, that looks like it was leftover from the set of "Lord of the Rings" or "Harry Potter". Three of its main branches had broken and fallen over so that their tips touch the ground and it is now supported at four points forming three triangles. The tree is, literally, rotten to the core. The base of the trunk is hollow, big enough to hold most of the seven dwarfs plus some rabbits, squirrels and woodchucks. It should be completely dead, this willow, but it's not. It has new shoots coming out of its rotting carcass everywhere, with leaves still on them due to the mild fall. Beautiful, delicate, yellow-green leaves that just won't give up, it seems. The same, I suppose, could be said of this nation.

Let's hope so.

So I am back to art and nature and I leave you with this little collage (which I've used here before) called "Fed Up Yet?"

My thanks and very best wishes to you all, and to this world we all share.

Sweet dreams.

Love, Neil