The Unclad Soul

I am fighting pessimism. I do not want to be sour and gloomy and see only all that is wrong in our country and the world. I am trying to not believe we are at the edge of the abyss staring into the darkness. The poet Mary Oliver has written, “My concern for the world is a sorrowful business.” I have that concern as well. I struggle to breathe easier, to lessen the stresses, to find a place beyond the hard realities of this current debacle that is our nation and its defective government. My Facebook friend, Shelley Henderson, shared an astonishing poem from the brilliant Kate Tempest, titled, “Brand New Ancients.” In it, she writes, “In the old days, the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves But how can we explain the way we hate ourselves? The things we’ve made ourselves into, the way we break ourselves in two, the way we overcomplicate ourselves? We are still permanently trapped somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.”