It was a surreal week. Our president threatened to take this country to the point of civil war if his own selfish aspirations were not satisfied. In addition, the majority of our senators sold off any semblance of integrity by reversing their position of letting the incumbent president nominate the candidate for the seat in the Supreme Court vacated by Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I fought to maintain a positive attitude this last week. Needless to say, by the time Friday afternoon arrived, this corpse needed revival.
I made the mistake a couple of weeks ago of letting self-pity pull me down into the primordial ooze of the drained swamp. Rather than be held captive up to my knees in the reeking sludge, I am once again pulling myself out onto higher ground. The vestiges of the absinthe in Friday’s cocktail have evaporated from my mind and have been replaced by Louis Armstrong reminding me that this is in fact a beautiful world.
I flipped through my folder of images and came across this photo of the Castle Hill lighthouse on Narragansett Bay. Taken almost a year after my cancer surgery, I will remember this as a time of renewed optimism. I was checking off my bucket list, a pail in each hand.
There may be no more iconic symbol of hope than a lighthouse. For more than two thousand years, their beacons, being projected out into the darkness, have been guiding seafarers to refuge. Anchored precariously where the land and sea meet, they have withstood the tempest of innumerable storms. Selfless light keepers, knowing that maintaining the continuity of the beacon was all that separated a sailor from arriving safely to port or washing up lifeless on the beach, courageously remained on station even though their lives faced the identical jeopardy.
Today many people are speaking out to alert us to the hazards that are lurking just below the water’s surface. We must not ignore their warnings. As this country, without a capable captain at the helm, is plowing full steam ahead through treacherous waters, the potential for catastrophe is an imminent and real possibility.
