Ides of August, Seeds of Hope

There is something about late August that makes me feel doomed.  Let me document this year's ides of August.  I realize that we're almost two weeks out from the 13th, when the actual ides would be, according to the Roman calendar.

Actually, as I think back, August seems to be a sinkhole of a month, the month of beginning a war or launching an invasion (which will often start a war) or pulling out of a disaster of a policy or ignoring the intelligence which will lead to a disaster which will lead to a war (here I'm thinking of September 11).

Sadly, I don't expect U.S. policymakers to learn anything from our time in Afghanistan.  Reading this article about all the fruitless ways we've intervened in the world, starting with 1950's Korea, makes optimism a tough sell, and reading this article about Afghanistan in particular leads to despair.  But perhaps instead of looking back, I should be looking at our present.  What's being ignored?  What will we shake our heads at, 20 years from now, wondering why we didn't behave differently?  I suspect it will have something to do with the weather and the climate, something August foretells.  

It feels like it will be hot forever, the kind of hot that smothers, the hazy hot, not the clear heat.  I used to love to run in the middle of the day when I lived in Knoxville, Tennessee, where the high was 85 degrees, without much humidity.  I came home from a run feeling cleansed.  Lately, I've been coming in from my morning exercise feeling like I've been mugged.  It feels like the world is either on fire or being flooded.  This year, that feeling seems more like fact than metaphor.

I've been tripping over my feet.  This doesn't happen every August, but I do remember a few years ago commenting on my skinned knees.  This August, I'm pulling my left hamstring over and over again.  I've tripped over a suitcase, tripped over a palm frond, tripped over a seam in the parking garage lot at work.  I've kept myself from falling, but at cost to my hamstring.  It will heal, but it would heal faster if I didn't keep pulling it.

If I did a Google search of important artists who died in August, would I be surprised at how many of them have been important to me?  The death of Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer, makes me ponder, while this article in The Washington Post made me smile at the idea of this person with a jazz sensibility making an interesting artistic life.

When I lived in places with more of a sense of seasons, it was easier to tell myself that in a few weeks, we'd get our first break in the heat.  Down here at the southeastern tip of the continent, I dread the uptick in the hurricane season, while also knowing we won't get a break in the heat for another 2-3 months.  Sigh.

And yet, let me not overlook the signs of hope, even if it's not the hope of autumnal weather and changing leaves.  My 6th floor condo balcony now has at least 3 chrysalises.  The mi-fi hot spot at work performed well yesterday; I can spend time complaining about how many e-mails I get in a regular day at work, so I was surprised to realize how anxious I felt when I was receiving no e-mails at all.

This morning, as I went on my morning walk/jog/run, I enjoyed a breeze that felt miraculous after weeks of moribund weather.  And I reflected on the poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, whose first novel The Love Songs of W. E. B. DuBois is an Oprah pick, while also getting a magnificent review by Ron Charles in The Washington Post.  

And let me remember that I got a correspondence yesterday letting me know that the article that I wrote for Gather will be published, and sending me forms to fill out for payment.  What great news.  It came after a day of internet restoration at work and me beginning to feel like I'm going to be able to be successful in seminary classes.

Many seeds are sprouting--let me focus on the ones that give me hope.