A Long Ten Days

It's been a very long ten days.  February seems longer than usual, due in part to the miserable weather ( today we have snow/sleet/ black ice/ rising temperatures/rain/fog)  but due also to my worrying about my university.  The conflicts over our new president escalated , to put it mildly.  I don't feel like telling the story here.  Suffice it to say that we aired our dirty laundry in the press, and much angry response has appeared in the comments section of every news article and on Facebook and Twitter.  I have said many rosaries, since that prayer is one I am able to say when I am distressed and distracted. I have faith that something good will come from this debacle... eventually.

Enough of that.

Here's a wonderful poem by Jane Hirschfield that Garrison Keillor read on "The Writer's Almanac" yesterday morning:

Hope and Love   by Jane Hirschfield   All winter the blue heron slept among the horses. I do not know the custom of herons, do not know if the solitary habit is their way, or if he listened for some missing one— not knowing even that was what he did— in the blowing sounds in the dark, I know that hope is the hardest love we carry. He slept with his long neck folded, like a letter put away.     "Hope and Love" by Jane Hirshfield from The Lives of the Heart. © Harper Perennial, 1997. Reprinted with permission.