Taxes, Poetry, and Other Obligations

The world can't stop talking about Donald Trump's taxes, although I'm sure there will soon be something new that makes us appalled.  I have known since early in my working life that the tax laws are skewed towards the wealthy.  I paid the highest percentage of my income in taxes during my grad school years, when I was earning the least amount of money; and much of those earnings were grad school assistantships, which Ronald Reagan declared could be taxed about a year before I started grad school.  

I have known that Donald Trump had something to hide, since he kept hiding information.  Therefore, I'm not surprised when the information makes him look bad.  I've known he's a man of questionable character for decades now--so I'm not surprised when his behavior makes him look bad.

Soon we can move on and discuss the debates, and soon we'll be voting.  Hopefully soon after that, we'll have solid, verifiable results.

However, I want to talk about something more pleasant.

Two weeks ago, I tried to write a poem that incorporated Hildegarde of Bingen, but I felt like I was just doing the same thing that I've done before, using the life of a medieval mystic (usually female) to contrast to the lives we're living now.

This morning, I came at the poem from a completely different angle:  what can a medieval mystic teach us about how to live during a time of pandemic?  From cloistering to robes to ordering the day--if I lived a different life, a freelance writer kind of life, I'd write it up as an article and hope that I'd get my big break.

Maybe I'd even write a self-help book--but would it get published before there was a vaccine?  If there was a vaccine, would there be a need for such a book?

And now I'm thinking of my unpublished book length memoir project, a project which probably reads very differently now.  I haven't been working on getting it published. so I'm not broken hearted that it probably won't be published in our current time.  It can join the others in my file of "Might Be Useful Some Day" manuscripts.  Sigh.

Wait, I said I was going to talk about something more pleasant.  Shelved manuscripts probably aren't the most pleasant thing.  But the evidence of continuing to show up, continuing to write, even in the face of unpleasant news from the larger world--that is pleasant indeed!