A crescent moon and lilac clouds on my drive home from Cambridge at dinnertime tonight. Feeling more hopeful. Poetry, a workshop I attended, saved my soul today, truly. Morning walk in the slushy woods. I could not get a swimming lane at my usual time at the pool. So I walked in the wetlands. Feeling very droopy and down. The humiliation of Zelensky yesterday, a travesty. The degradation of the White House in the hands of bullies and showmen. I came home and realized I had not prepared for the workshop I had signed up for in Cambridge, hosted by Jennifer Markell an run by Fred Marchant and Jennifer Barber, poet laureate of Brookline. I felt, no, I don’t have a poem I want to bring. And I cannot, in this mood I am in, write anything. And I only had an hour. Still, it came. A poem came. And I felt I had something, fresh as it was. And I drove into Cambridge. Jennifer’s house is full of lovely art. It’s intimate with huge windows. I watched the bird feeder. Lovely poets and discussion of our poems. Mostly poets I had not yet met, all from Boston area. And my poem went over very well and I had great feedback. I felt so much better coming home. We had take out and watched a silly movie and laughed. And I gave and got a shoulder rub.Suddenly, it’s March. The weather changing. I listened, toward the end of my walk, to a podcast interview with our Governor (of Massachusetts) Maura Healey being interviewed by Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the New York Times and Healey is giving me hope that there are influential and smart leaders, like she is, ready to fight. She tells Navarro about the Annual National Governors Association meeting with Trump:

Well, you go to the White House with the expectation that you’re going to hear the president articulate some vision for the future. It’s supposed to be an opportunity to talk about how governors and states can work with a new administration. That wasn’t what this was about. The meeting began with an address by Stephen Miller, and then later the president came out and began by recounting that he’s got the highest approval rating of anybody this early in his tenure, that he won the election not once, not twice, but three times, and then continued with a litany of conspiracy theories and false information. So it was unfortunate because I’m there as governor thinking: Let’s have a conversation about maybe where we can work together, right? How can we focus on the needs of everyday Americans? But unfortunately, we didn’t see any of that. What was also upsetting is that we saw him attack another governor.

Healey is a voice of action and leadership stepping up.