Losing Hope

I’m looking out the big windows in my “tree house room” into a sky washed in muted blue and grey and white clouds. Huge limbs block pieces of the sky. Leaves that will, a few months hence, fall as brown and orange litter, retain their deep green hues for now. I think any other day like today would give me reason to celebrate life. Any other day would  offer joy as a byproduct of being who and where I am. But today is bleak. I am thinking this morning about the murder of five police officers in Dallas and the recent senseless killing of two more black men by police officers who, it seems to me, reacted in fear to the circumstances that confronted them. Today is bleak because I do not see an end to this. This country needs a calm, resourceful leader to guide us out of the abyss. That leader is most certainly not Donald Trump. And it’s not Hillary Clinton, either. It’s not Bernie Sanders or Paul Ryan or any of the other politicians whose egos stoke the fires that burn  the heart and soul of America to ashes. I don’t know who that much-needed leader is, but I know who it’s not. Maybe it would have been John Fitzgerald Kennedy or Martin Luther King or the Dali Lama. But they are not leading us. No one is. We are packs of savages with no one to shepherd us in to the caves in which we belong. I’ve not felt the hopelessness I feel this morning since I was in college, the first fall semester when I thought the only solution to resolve the pain was to die. I know that’s no solution; the world would go on imploding on itself without me. But the utter hopelessness I feel at this very moment is palpable; it courses through my veins as if it were thick grey concrete, hardening with each passing second.