For Cabell.

I'm writing this on Sunday morning.

It's as sunny outside as the planet Mercury.

And off the sea that's about twenty yards off from my arthritic left shoulder, there's a glistening like a thousand disco balls lit by ten thousand lasers.

It's the first day of Spring as you read this.

And for the change of seasons, I thought I'd try something different for a change.

A change for the change of seasons.

Despite the gloom that sits heavily on the world, I thought I would try today to smile in this space.

I thought I would try some optimism. Some love. Some laughter and some hope.

Even if it's feigned and ephemeral, a cosmic puppet show put on by holograms, let's give a glow a moment to shine.

What started me off this morning was an early conversation with a brilliant art partner of mine. We're working together and not trying to fill up the requisite rectangles everyone expects us to fill up.

Instead we're trying to act like kids in summer camp, swimming in a lake when the head lifeguard whistles "free swim." 

We're trying to make a mess, to splash each other with thoughts and challenges and ideas, to dunk each other in the cool water of the unexpected, to swallow a little of the brack, to laugh spitting it out and to keep going on. Going to the exhaustion at the end of the day, when we are as tired as an old leaf, but know that we gave our all to collect all the sunshine we could collect.

The last stanzas of the greatest poem ever written in American English reads,

Oh somewhere in this favored land,
The sun is shining bright.
The band is playing somewhere,
And somewhere hearts are light.

Somewhere men are laughing,
And somewhere children shout,
But there is no joy in Mudville,
Mighty Casey has struck out.

There's sadness in those words of course. 

But let's not forget the brightness of the sun, the playing of the band, the lightness in our hearts. Let's not forget the laughter and the sorry. The love, desire and hate. Of course they have a portion in us, after we pass the gate.

But let's, all of us, this Spring and a trillion Springs to come, look hard into our own eyes and find the joy that lives in our own private Mudvilles.

Let's find that joy and like Casey, even if we whiff, 99 times out of one-hundred, let's laugh it out and give to each other something of the words conjured by Neruda below.

Can we?

Can we?

Can we make cherry trees of life?

We can try.