[frame align=”right”][/frame]Here on the eve of a noisy election, I am experiencing what some have referred to as media fatigue. There was a song in the Sixties about “useless information” and lately I find myself talking back to the TV journalists, snarling at the screen, mouthing and mumbling like an adolescent at the back of the class.

“So what?” and “Who cares?”

Well, I do care, but right now I long for white space. In my life and on the page. I flip through travel brochures and stare at the photographs—the lost city of Petra, half-carved into rose-red cliffs by what the brochure calls ‘the mysterious Nabataean people,” a city buried by the shifting desert sands. And I wonder about the shifting sands in American politics, culture, and now what appears can no longer be denied–the rising seas.

I don’t like to feel jaded. I want to lap up all the news. Ordinarily I’m a NPR junkie, and in the car my son and daughter would poke fun at me always listening to talk. Now, I surprise myself. I turn off the radio. I am silence-starved.

And so, all the more reason to turn to fiction, poetry, a painting. Experience a moment in time that’s not filled with the tweets, the bleats, the data. I know, I’m sounding grouchy. And even as I write I’m adding to the chatter.

It’s a late afternoon in November. I look out my window and wonder.

 

 

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