How to salvage a soggy Summer

Summer solstice is about a month away. This year's weather has us wondering if we'll have enough dry wood for a Solstice fire, emphasis on the dry. After last night's winds, the drive and yard are again full of dead oak branches, none of them particularly dry. Weather forecasters are warning us the entire Summer may be cool and wet. We will have to bring about a major attitude adjustment, as well as break out our foul weather gear.

On the bright side, wet ground will make it easier to pull the smaller buckthorn bushes. On the darker side, frequent rains will severely hinder our planned attacks on the poison ivy that's now emerging. Thank heavens we're coming to rely more and more on certain lyrics by Leonard Cohen and a quotation of Samuel Beckett's.

• Cohen (from Anthem)
  
  Ring the bells that still can ring
  Forget your perfect offering
  There is a crack in everything
  That's how the light gets in 


• Beckett (from Worstword Ho)
  
  Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

If the reports of the IPCC and the UN are to be believed, and we think they are, weather, politics, economies and many factors in contemporary life are likely to get worse before they may get better. We've read too much of Rebecca Solnit to allow ourselves the luxury of despair. It took the Irish how long before they got the colonizers most of the way out of Ireland? Native Americans and other indigenous peoples have been resisting colonizers for how many hundreds of years? It is time for us to transform the values on which we base our judgements. We kind of like the way Banksy has phrased it for the Extinction Rebellion folks:

London Extinction Rebellion mural is a Banksy, says expert 

Perhaps because we're the product of a classical education, we're familiar with the (mock) Latin saying "Illegitimi non carborundum," but we much prefer Kris Kristofferson's version.

[UPDATE: we stumbled into this quote that, we think, nicely fits today's theme:

“Surely, in the light of history, it is more intelligent to hope rather than to fear, to try rather than not to try. For one thing we know beyond all doubt: Nothing has ever been achieved by the person who says, ‘It can’t be done.’”
               ~~Eleanor Roosevelt, Voice of America, November 11, 1951]

You Must

Jon Andersen

You must have a hope
that will let you stomp and sing
at any cold dawn.
You must not wait
to love the student who loves you
and would like to kill you.
You must read the story again
and again to the child
who receives you with a bovine stare.
You must get up
every day to punch in
not dreaming on transcendence,
not desiring new heroes or gods,
not looking the other way,
but looking for the other way
and ready to talk to everyone on the line.
You must not wait
for official approval
nor general consensus
to rage.  You must
come again to kneel
in shiny, rock-strewn soil
not to pray, but to plant.
Yes, even now
as ice caps melt and black top
goes soft in the sun
you must prepare for the harvest.

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