Beauty and Blue

Blue washes in, sometimes subtly like a languorous tide, other times racing head-on, an unexpected monster of a wave. Sometimes, within a day, Blue toggles between the two, back and forth, back and forth, like windshield wipers in a storm. Beauty appears to provide light and perspective. Though at times she accentuates that which Blue seeks to expose, Beauty is always welcome because she softens the rough angles of sad and illumines all the good that is still extant. In France today, hateful, hypocritical extremists again tried to silence the very freedom they wish to have. I am so sick of Muslim fanatics. Indeed I am sick of all those who disgrace the god or country they claim to work on behalf of by murdering innocents. No one can say that's reasonable, forgivable or just; those who do are crazy. Literally. And I'm an atheist, for christ's sakes.

Yet, I was heartened by the fact that today's actions were, at least momentarily, drowned out by a cohesive chorus of #jesuischarlie, online and all over Europe. Je suis, aussi.

While driving earlier, I saw a beautiful doe race across a busy intersection. She was so scared that in mid-stride, her knees buckled, and she fell. Ever-graceful and certainly terrified, she righted herself and made it across. My hand flew to my mouth in an involuntary gasp of fear and hope, awe for her instinctive grace under pressure. I have continued to wish that she is alright and worry that she's not.

My heavy heart was given reprieve after school when the boys and I were snuggled in Jack's twin bed. Oliver pants'ed Jack and plunged his nose towards Jack's bum just as Jack farted a dutch oven. The timing was magnificent, and we all dissolved into a grotesquely stunned bout of laughter.

As Blue is wont to do, utter hilarity can be quickly unwoven by melancholy's efficient needles, ruinous beasts working in reverse. I snapped after the third time that a boy tried to listen as I peed, wiggling fingers under the door, waiting so closely outside of it that it swung back to pop my nose when I tried to exit. Anger and frustration and fatigue easily overwhelm equanimity and lightness; disappointment in that fact laps repeatedly over the just-made wound, like the wake made by a speedboat exceeding the bayou's modest limits.

"I really must go," I tell Blue.

"Ah," he says, "but let me tell you just one more thing."