The news ain’t great these days.

Most mornings as I wait the recommended four minutes before I can press the coffee, I scan my email inbox. Along with the tantalizing smell of freshly ground coffee brewing, my senses are assaulted with the latest New York Times Breaking News Headlines. While there is the very occasional headline that to my heart constitutes good news—the swearing in of Judge Katanji Brown Jackson—most of the time what I read breaks my heart a little more—the past two weeks have almost put me under—and hope is hard to find.

It’s not a great way to start the day.

So, I changed it.

I unsubscribed to The NY Times newsletter.

I subscribed to Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer’s A Hundred Falling Veils: there’s a poem in every day

This morning I was greeted with my first poem from Rosemerry, about, of all things, hope. (You can find her poem, Longing to Be Seen here)

How we start the day matters. Along with coffee and time with my husband and our dog as the sunlight first hits the meadow, I’m choosing to start my day with poetry, and a little hope.

Maybe you will too.

(Now before you go jumping to any conclusions, it’s not that I don’t want to be informed about the goings on in the world. I am simply choosing not to start my day there. Being part of a well informed citizenry matters to me, and it should matter to you too. Our democracy depends on it. There are good sources of news, as in real information as opposed to opinion and rhetoric out there, and, spoiler alert, they are not found on social media.)

We took the dogs and headed out to the Conboy Wildlife Refuge. It was cold, and sunny, and the contrast of the brilliant yellow-gold tamarack trees with their nearby neighbors, the lodgepole and ponderosa pines could not be more stark.

Once on the three-mile loop trail, we talked about things big and small as the dogs raced ahead, always coming back to check on us. From the viewing platform at the half-way point, it was obvious that fall was giving way to the coming winter, which in turn could only mean the eventual coming of spring and the appearance of new growth. New growth that is only made possible by the death and dropping away of this year’s growth.

Walking the refuge loop trail is always a reminder that life is a series of new beginnings, leading to eventual endings, only to come upon new beginnings once again. It is also a reminder of the need we have as human beings to find refuge from our personal storms with a select few sacred souls. Those who will walk with us as what has been drops away in order to make way for what can be.

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