The light was strange. I walked the Sandy River delta for the first time since January, so grateful to be back and a bit worried if I had the strength for the full round in the 90 degree September heat. Thoughts of the fragility of existence, my companions for too long, were underscored by the wind that came down from the mountains, making the dry branches and grasses bending and trembling, the poplars noisy with their rattling silver leaves, upended by the gusts.

The gusts were hints of colder times, easily ignored during this endless summer, perhaps perceived only because my thoughts were swirling around the essay I’ll urge you to read today, if you have time to read anything (I’ll keep my own remarks correspondingly short.) Robert Kagan, senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and a neoconservative scholar, lays out what quite likely might be ahead for us as a country, and it is frightening to hear its measured analysis by a conservative, no less.

Yes, politics. Yes, more bad news. Yes, I know the feeling of not wanting to hear one more scary thing in a world full of them.

Do read it.

You want to be prepared for what one might once thought unimaginable. Even though it is tempting to ignore that there is always a second act in the wings. One we might not like.

I might mention the German election results in passing…. major parties had a head-to head competition with a razor thin edge going, for now, to the Social Democrats – a centrist party who will need to form a coalition with any number of smaller parties to govern, an unwieldy moloch marked by political compromises. All signs point to continuation of the familiar paths rather than radical re-orientation in view of the needed actions for climate change. For me the most frightening number was the fact that among those voting for the first time a higher number picked a business friendly, conservative party (FDP) over the Green Party – so much for the “youth will save us.” And two large states in the Eastern parts of the country, Thuringia and Saxony, went all in for the right-wing extremist AfD. Berlin will have a mayor whose phD title was rescinded for plagiarism and who gave up her ministerial seat as minister for family in the wake of the scandal, now to oversee the government of the capital.

I’ll sweeten the reading assignment with some classic paintings of poplars that were brought to mind by the beauty in front of my eyes – in black and white to emphasize the structure and pattern (and similarities) of these wispy trees.

Maybe the river will have water again (photograph of the tree lined water is from 2 years ago around this time) – right now it is unimaginably low.

Soon the trees will shed their leaves, and the scent of decaying silver and gold will emanate from the layers and layers that soften your step. I’ll be out there again, soon.

Today’s music acknowledges that somehow most of these paintings seem to have originated in France, even though Germany and the PNW is full of poplars as well. The selection of pieces by Ravel is quite representative of his best work.

And here is a poem from the late 1800s :

Binsey Poplars

BY GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

felled 1879

My aspens dear, whose airy cages quelled, 
  Quelled or quenched in leaves the leaping sun, 
  All felled, felled, are all felled; 
    Of a fresh and following folded rank 
                Not spared, not one 
                That dandled a sandalled 
         Shadow that swam or sank 
On meadow & river & wind-wandering weed-winding bank. 

  O if we but knew what we do 
         When we delve or hew — 
     Hack and rack the growing green! 
          Since country is so tender 
     To touch, her being só slender, 
     That, like this sleek and seeing ball 
     But a prick will make no eye at all, 
     Where we, even where we mean 
                 To mend her we end her, 
            When we hew or delve: 
After-comers cannot guess the beauty been. 
  Ten or twelve, only ten or twelve 
     Strokes of havoc unselve 
           The sweet especial scene, 
     Rural scene, a rural scene, 
     Sweet especial rural scene.