Margaret Renkl finds her bird:
This year isn't living up to my hopes, so I am learning to hope in a new way.
I don't laugh much anymore. I am grieving a mismanaged pandemic that has taken too many of us and driven too many others to despair. I am grieving the assaults on American democracy by my fellow Americans. I am grieving the brutal news of the environment, which worsens with every new study. When a suicide bomber blew up a historic section of this town on Christmas morning, it felt entirely of a piece with a terrible, endless year. Surely, I thought, 2021 would be better.
But 2021 has not been better. The U.S. Capitol was invaded by U.S. citizens provoked by a U.S. president. Pandemic deaths are approaching half a million. The Doomsday Clock remains set at 100 seconds from disaster. My dog died. It all adds up to a sorrow that is both unimaginably vast and far too close to home.
I have faith in the promise of spring, but right now spring feels like just another cold concept, like the concept of herd immunity and the concept of reasonable Republicans. I know such things exist, but these days that knowledge feels more like a theory than a conviction...
And maybe it's enough in February, in these days that are so close to turning warm and bright and green again, when we are so close to being released from the prison of our homes, to think of happiness as neither distant nor grand. Perhaps it would help to remember that even now happiness is only what it has ever been: something that lights before us, immediate and insistent and always fleeting. Not a promise at all but a temporary gift. It lands, and lifts away, and returns again, ever flashing its wings.
Charles Darwin (
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