I’ve been working on the porch all afternoon, the impossibly blue sky highlighting the wind-blown lit green of the leaves. The wind has been my companion as well as two big dogs and a cat who insists on sleeping on my backpack. Aside from having to open and close doors multiple times for the animal migrations, it’s been a peaceful time of working on the computer.
Yet I’m also cognizant of how much this is a cusp time. “Tomorrow is the last warm day,” my 86-year-old mother-in-law told me last night. The cold front, the first one in earnest, is supposed to arrive tonight, bringing with it vastly needed rain and some days when the highs will be in the 50s (hard to imagine, given the summer we survived when lows often didn’t drop below the 90s). The hackberry tree across from me, the walnut tree catty-corner, will be swept and rained hard on, inevitably dropping many of the yellowing leaves that stare at me now.
The presidential debates also come soon, in less than 90 minutes, and we’re heading to a friend’s house to watch them on big screen TV. This also feels like a cusp time to me: Mitt Romney’s last real chance to surge ahead of Obama, which is the last thing I would want to see. I care deeply about this election, not because I believe Obama is perfect but because, after years of doing grassroots organizing myself, I know how hard it is to do the smallest bit of good in politics, and I do believe with all my heart in Obama as a man of integrity with the right plans for moving ahead. At the same time, I see how much on the cusp of craziness (and over the cusp) we are as a country, how divided and polarized people are from sitting down and doing the real work, and how much there is to fuel a million lifetimes of despair about it all.
Still, I hope. I welcome twilight, the cold front, the change of seasons, and the constant and almost always missed possibility of real unity, facing the global environmental and social issues with greater compassion, awareness and right action.
