Yesterday I said my mom loved god, my dad loved the woods, and my school told me to love America. Sorry mom…couldn’t go the god route, and certainly nothing in my history as an American has convinced me that this country deserves unqualified love. While I treasure the geography of my  land, I find it much harder to feel love for a number of my fellow Americans: the racists, the greedy, the purposely stupid, the violent and angry. As I watched the autopsy report on George Floyd being presented a few minutes ago, my suspicions that we’re not an honorable nation were again confirmed. It’s sad not to be proud of one’s home, I think you’ll agree. And I’m not. And I’m sad.

Fortunately I did inherit my dad’s love of the woods. Son Steven and I walked a restorative early morning five miles in the bosque, enjoying unqualified and prideful love of trees and the river and the early morning cool and calm.

While it’s important to be a skeptic of belief systems demanding worship; and essential to be angry, enraged in fact, over America’s inability to end its addiction to ‘isms’ … it is so fine to be among the trees for awhile…to find beauty and calm and unalloyed good down along our very own stretch of the Rio Grande.

Another day of sadness…except for my son and the cottonwoods and the slow blue water.