Dear Readers, I’m sorry to be so late with this “next” post.  But you all know that sometimes we seem to be having even more difficulties than we usually do.

And sometimes the world seems to give us even more causes for grief than it commonly does.

Things like a President expressing his liking and admiration for a foreign dictator who deprives his people of truth in order better to deceive and control them, who puts scores of people belonging to a minority into concentration camps, subjecting them to deprivations and tortures hidden from the general view.  Things like historic, horrific fires driving people from their homes and burning up thousands of trees on which other forms of life depend for air that they breathe, while the Governor of the state suffering the worst devastation has to remind people that the blazing holocaust is climate change in action.  And on and on, all of which made me put aside The New York Times and CNN in a very short time the other morning, my feelings being  driven to their knees by the weight.

And then, about an hour later, I came on this poem while reading haiku by Basho (translated by Sam Hamill):

With dewdrops dripping,

I wish somehow I could wash

this perishing world.