personal | sarahscapes

the happy couple

My son is getting married next Saturday. He’s probably the one who should be taking a few days off. But I’m the one hanging out by the ocean with my two daughters and a close friend.

They assembled five raised garden beds for me – my dream of permanent rhubarb, asparagus and raspberries to complement my husband’s dream fruit orchard now underway. This involved constructing the cedar beds themselves and preparing the ground beneath. How seamlessly each young woman found her niche in this cooperative effort. While I took it easy.

In one spot preparation required evicting a boulder from underground. This is New England, after all. I took it easy, capturing the deed.

Now the sun is getting ready to set, the largest moon about to rise. In a couple of hours’ time, my girls and I shall gather by the water’s edge to take it all in.

Taking it easy.

I am not a politically active creature. Ever since ‘feminism’ first marbled across my lips, even sank into my taste buds, I have heard ‘the personal is political.’ The fundamental impact of those words, however, eluded me. For a time.

Fast forward to the coursing of ‘conscious feminine’ through my whole being – about concurrent with the National Declaration of Either/Or; add in my calling to write with incarcerated women; and I now find myself awake in a cold sweat, day and night, feverish to address everything at once.

And yet – I keep missing my self-appointed Friday blog date with the conscious feminine. Last night I learned why: I am outraged. Sputtering. Speechless, almost. At the Great National Divide between Those Who Think and, well, everyone else. It seems the latest national past time (and it’s WAY passed time for this to end) has become to elevate the lowest common denominator to the highest law of the land. Through repetition of the patently absurd (think ‘you can’t get pregnant from rape’). Where I come from, repeated wishful thinking never did make it so. A variant on Albert Einstein’s famed definition of ‘insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.’

You can see how distant I keep myself from today’s political tactics.

What on earth is going on here? Well, dear Reader, it turns out we all – yes, women AND men – have urges. For sex, power, violence; as well as genuine desire for opportunity and the well-being of our citizens. AND we live, for better and worse, in a society. Which means we are in it together. What we say matters. How we act matters. Yet, along with reality and civil discourse, we seem to have lost sight of our basic God-given abilities to think, to reason. To listen. To reflect. With respect for difference; not the all-too-common derision or defiance, the coarsest acts of deception which have become the de rigeur standard of discourse by our would-be leaders.

Let’s focus on other d-words, like decency and decorum. I’ll even settle for democracy: that’s at least about the people, not a handful of very rich men asserting their unthinking opinions over and over again, hoping to move us toward change. The thinking man Einstein had it right: that’s just insanity.