. . . When you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we do not blow off anyone else’s legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheelchair, each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less harm, less harm, less harm. . .

Excerpt from “Pray for Peace,” by Ellen Bass

Charlie is not worried about the wind through the trees this morning, but I am. Still, I go, we go, out to the river. He very much needs this. It is not so windy as a I fear, though there are branches down. The ice mostly gone. The brook running fast from the melt. There is so much energy in this lovely water-rush of blue and white and black. Then, I swim. I am happily addicted to swimming these laps. A half mile today. The pool is calm, not many swimmers this morning. I am always swimming in two places at once: here in the pool, and also in Farm Pond, in summer. Because my eyes are closed, my imagination wanders and body memory takes over. I have a client, and then I must revise two poems for a workshop this afternoon with Vanessa Jimenez Gabb. Agh. Endings! More troubling endings! These two poems were written over a year ago and I’ve fussed and fussed with the endings. Today, I dig in. And, somehow, I tweak here and there, and get the endings, finally, finally, to come out right. Also, I prep for my webinar tonight. This group of writers goes deep tonight; real, raw, and risk-taking, and trusting each other. It’s powerful. I’m sleepy now. So many many thoughts about Ukraine and the world today as everything changes so fast, and the suffering intensifies and my imagination is caught up, empathically, in the horrible emotional binds the high stakes choices put Ukrainians in. I listen on the BBC to an interview with a young woman who must decide today whether she will take her chance leave––which will mean leaving her mother who won’t leave because her grandparents won’t leave. And her mother says, I cannot tell you whether you should stay or go, this must be your decision. And the young woman is torn. Clearly, the choices she makes today (and I don’t know what that is) will impact, profoundly, the rest of her life. Putin, the madman, has put countless innocent people into these inhumane predicaments, on a maniacal lust for power and personal aggrandizement and control. If Kafka is right, and “writing is prayer,” then I guess this writing tonight is somehow my bedtime prayer.