I’m ready.
Here I am, suddenly December. The nut tree’s leaves out back have just started to fall. Yesterday, the breeze picked up in the morning after a hard freeze overnight and a few yellow ones started to fall, like dozens of traffic lights. The green ones still are clinging. It’ll be a few more days before the rest come down.
We’re in line for the coldest first week of December we’ve had in a while. Maybe ever.
Everything looks like a wilderness, and not just here. He gestures at the landscape.
Several things are not going my way. Work. Wallet. Wanting things to work out some other way. Wasteland.
A brief digression: they call the thing that happens on social media a feed, but that’s not what it does. It starves, in the way that all wastelands can. But we line up for it anyway. Trough over truth.
It’s Advent 1 and we’re supposed to talk about hope.
Hope is sometimes the clinging leaf.
I’ve long gotten over the idea that a God who yawns at mass death and destruction somewhere else in the world will find himself moved by an election somewhere else. Doesn’t work that way. As upset as I may find myself at the pick of Secretary of Such and Such, that person will go to work in a building that hasn’t been hollowed out by an airstrike. It’s a different kind of wasteland, granted.
This is not the kind of hope I need. I am ready for another kind of hope.
We decided not to rake this year. Dead things can feed whatever’s coming.
Hope is in the fallen leaf, too.