The world is full of incompatibles...



 This tree blooming white with all it has. 

This tree inches deep in moss.











 My dear friend Kim walking with my daughter along rain coated pavers. 












There are these things, all true and excellent in the deepest sense.

Then there is the other side, represented recently by pressure cookers packed with nails and ball-bearings and intent to harm, a shoot-out down Cambridge's Memorial Ave., a campus policeman shot dead.

On Monday, when my mother called to tell me about the marathon bombings in Boston, I turned on my radio, set as always to my public radio station.  It's pledge week here, so reports on the bombing were interspersed with MTPRs regular cast of voices asking for support and reading from the list of premiums you could receive with your donation: rafting trips, llama manure, a full year of home-baked pies.  There's a big-tent, community feel to Montana's public radio drives which I typically love.  But on Monday, this reality felt strangely skewed from the reality of the news cast - jarring like two discordant things playing at once.

I'm never really sure what to do with the sadness generated in the course of this precious, careening life.  It is part of the business of living, I suppose.  There's no doubt our ancestors were just as confounded by loss and grief and injustice and violence as we are.  It is all through our history and holy writ, this human story. 

Yesterday, down by the creek, I picked six blades of grass and dropped them into the current singly, whispering a name of each of the four Boston victims (those deceased, though hundreds terrorized) and the names of the two perpetrators as I released each blade in the water.  I watched them spin on the current and head downstream, tiny slivers balancing on the water.  I watched until they were out of sight, the bright dazzle of the creek rendering them harder and harder to see.  For me this little ritual is a way to commit sadness and confusion to where they belong, that nameless place that makes room for them and resists explaining them away, yet nevertheless, casts them amid the shimmer and liquid logic of the rest of life.

And that's life with its incompatibles: those achingly beautiful momentary blossoms, the sadness and fear and rage storming through the Hub, the llama manure and rafting trips and home-baked pies, and the creek pouring on and on and on.