Wet Day

It is a grey and dreary day here in Natick and (though this happens rather rarely) it matches my mood. Alas! It seems that the post-holiday slump is upon us and it is hard to get too excited.

I have been thinking a bit about the Super Bowl lately. I have not so much for the game but because of the location. Many articles have been written about the odd juxtaposition of the wealth of team owners and their corporate friends with the general economic and physical landscape of the great-but-suffering city of Detroit. Many people say that the NFL owners should "do something" for the city. I am at a loss as to what that might be. However, every time someone says "Ford Stadium" I can only think of all those families Ford laid off just weeks ago and how none of them will be at the game.

All I can say is that the tension of images may help some to see the plight of this and other cities at the beginning of the 21st Century. No cheery facade can obscure the situation, no matter how hard folks try. Most people don't need parties as much as they need jobs. Certainly they don't need parties that they aren't really invited to in the first place. Maybe people will have cause to think about how our national economy has helped some a great deal and others not at all. Maybe, if this turns out to be true, there is a silver lining after all.

I used this prayer by May Sarton at Rotary today:
Help us to be the always hopeful
gardeners of the spirit
who know that without darkness
nothing comes to birth
as without light
nothing flowers

Also, this by Robert Browning was a runner-up
I but open my eyes--and perfection, no more and no less
In the kind I imagined, full-fronts me, and God is seen God
In the star, in the stone, in the flesh, in the soul and the clod