The Last Good Day Redux

When is the last good day and will we know it when it comes...

I started writing an essay about living with limited means and how angry it made me, that someone who has more in his couch cushions than I will ever earn in my lifetime, and what right did he have to determine what was wasteful and lacking in efficiency in MY life?

But it just made me angrier and depressed so I put it aside.

With all that has been bombarding us nooz-wise, I started thinking about the essay I wrote when Mehitabel left me just over eight years ago, back when F45’s first reign of terror was just beginning. I called it The Last Good Day. It was a refection on my life with Mehitabel and the process of letting go. You can read it HERE.

I started with this observation:

How do we know when it is the last good day? We most often don’t, until that day has already passed. Then, if we can see clearly, if we can look back and say, “That Tuesday, the one in August when the sun was shining but the humidity was low, and it was only in the low 80’s.”

That day.

The cognitive dissonance of making a shopping list, doing laundry, baking bread, planning for a creative retreat with my writing/illustration friends and then reading another story about how F45 is threatening to invade Canada, how his feral pet billionaire is invading our personal information and talking about how Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, the contrast between this is Tuesday and tomorrow the sky will fall is all kinds of crazy making.

We are lemmings heading toward the cliff, we are children reaching our hand towards the hot stove, we are people getting in our cars to head to the store to buy oatmeal.

When IS the Last Good Day?

Has it already passed? Or is it still months in the future? Can we turn back from the cliff in time, feel the heat and pull our hand away, thus keeping that last good day to some unspecified time in the distant future?

Beyond the bleakness of the news there are bright sparks of joy. The dark purple hellebore patch that I started from a handful of seedlings from my friend’s garden has spread to cover the shady dell just as I drive onto my own patch of paradise. Fritillary are just about to bloom at the edge of my patio. Days of cool, weak sun draw me out into the garden. Somehow in the vastness of the world beyond my computer screen I have reconnected with friends who I thought were lost to me forever.

There is the daily text chain with the Panda Sisterhood, Wednesday pizza night, Saturdays watching movies with my sweetie, good days in the studio. I watch and read and weep at the bravery and dedication of people who have dedicated their actions to keeping compassion and empathy and kindness and peace and justice in the world. We will NOT let the good in the world be destroyed!

And yet…

We find ourselves here, watching as a man who has so much it would not be possible for one person to spend it all in 100 lifetimes, say in the most powerful room in the country that we should let people around the world starve.

I want my last good day. I want to know when it comes. I want to know that the mountains and the forests will stand, that clean rivers will flow with enough fish for all the bears.

One answer, I think, is to notice the good days as they are given to us. To slow down enough to notice as they go by. To open the door and sniff the air and then go to the store.

My friend

Lorene Edwards Forkner

in a recent post quoted Tolkien:

Lorene Edwards Forkner
Cultivating Color

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

— J. R. R. Tolkien Fellowship of the Ring

Art will show us the way. Let’s hope we have the wisdom to follow it.

Thank you to all who have taken the time to read my meanderings through this 100 Acre Wood. There will always be an open door to all who are friendly to Bears.