Blue Monday
Multiple browsers open: ozone depletion, Rio summit, Zika virus,painkiller trials causing death in France, Ella Fitzgerald singing Angel Eyes on Martin Luther King day. My daughter’s brain, full-size and firing on all cylinders, is processing the earth’s demise en français, while a mosquito somewhere south of us draws blood from a mother and gives her a virus that will make her baby’s head come out all wrong. Not just the little infant head, the brain inside it, too. Brazil’s got it bad, thousands of infants with microcephaly, desperately advising women not to get pregnant in the rainy season. Here, Eat Magazine’s telling me that it’s a New Year, to enjoy a New Breakfast Bowl, and that sausages are all good again, and a Barry Lopez quote I found on Facebook addresses the biggest question I ask in my work, the gap between the horrors of the world and its absolute wonders; he says that “One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.” On my walk today I took a photo of dark bars of shadow in the sky and thought they were the result of The Rumbles, electronic-warfare aircraft being tested in the American Gulf Islands, but instead, found out they were anticrepuscular rays, an atmospheric optical wonder 180 degrees from the setting sun. Faithfully I take my Vitamin D after years of believing the sun was enough, worry where to store my earthquake kit, because, although we attempt to translate the planet’s translations, all we can do is guess, and go on, and lean into the corners, holding on. “There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”
