In The Last Luminous Limbo Moment

You can't stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others tocome to you. You have to go to them sometimes. A.A.Milne, Winnie the Pooh

This sunny, well-windowed room is like a box of light today, and frankly it’s alittle hard to work. The world has that after-rain brightness, with plump clouds playing shadow and a sky of cornflower blue. Everything seems epic and auspicious.

I can’t help it if I talk like this. I am focused on human history and the events that are unfolding right now, but I live in a place that leaves you spellbound at times, where the natural world still seems vast and distracting, still seems to have something to say.

The other day, for example, I was standing with two friends beneath the trees in the canyon when the sparkling percussive music of the universe encircled us, the sound of rain on leaves. It was a sound like whispers and rustling rising to applause, a sound like tambourines and laughter, a sound that quenched a thirst we didn’t know we had. It was sudden and secret and it quickly passed, but we knew we had been blessed.

In that other reality, the man-made one, the eve of the election has arrived. Like so many others, I have been obsessed with this election, and I've written about it enough to sound redundant, but I am convinced that in this unusually challenging moment in history, Barack Obama is uniquely qualified to lead us, and I cannot imagine how devastating it will be if he does not prevail. It's crazy-making to be this close to the day, feeling optimistic and frantic all in the same breath, feeling a little useless and irrelevant but wondering if there is still something more one can do. As much for my own therapy as anything else, I made a few final “get out the vote” phone calls to Ohio and Virginia today, and I don’t think I am very adept at that, but I want to feel that I stayed involved right up to the end, even from my remote little corner of the forest.

Because now is that last pivotal moment when all is still possible, when we can still believe that the best in us will prevail, that hope will triumph over fear. The outcome of this election will be a declaration of who we are as a nation and the face we will present to the world. Will we choose to calcify into obsolescence or rise with grace and courage to enter a new era?

Let’s talk the day after.