Everything Has Its Time
Everything Has Its Time The fat buds of the rhododendron, getting ready to burst into flower. The white bracts of the dogwood, offering up their nectar to the bees. All the deciduous trees, in the yard and up and down the road, showing off the youthful hue of their new green leaves, preening beneath the tender gaze of today's cloudless sky. My elderly Achilles tendons suddenly tight and sore. The clock inside my body ticking away no less diligently than the clocks inside everything else that's alive. Moving toward my own senescent display of sunset-colored leaves--whatever legacy of words I manage to magick out of air before Demeter sighs and life retreats again to that unseeable place inside the bare winter branches, underneath the earth scorched by winter, hopelessness and war. Copyright © 2026 by Barbara Quick
Partly as a way to stave off going to bed too early (old age, political despair, escapism?) we watched Adam McKay’s 2021 film “Don’t Look Up!” last night. We had watched it before, after Joe Biden was safely installed in the White House, when the film first became streamable and we were all assuming that the worst was over. We figured that if we got too sleepy, we could just stop the film and go to bed, since we’d seen it before.
As so often happens with art, the story was transformed by time into something much greater than it seemed when first presented to the world.
Yes, this is a dark, satirical movie and was meant to show how blind we’re being to our own stupidity as stewards of our beautiful planet.
I liked the film when I first saw it. But this time I sobbed throughout the last 15 minutes or so, even through that deeply satisfying comedic moment when Meryl Streep, as a stand-in for the worst sort of President, has her head munched by a hungry predator on the planet where she and her mega-rich friends thought they’d live with impunity after destroying our world.
Streep’s character is a precise and prescient portrayal of Trump 2.0, as he is somehow—why?—being allowed to frog-march us all to cataclysmic planetary disaster.
An asteroid the size of Mt. Everest is unimpeded on its crash-course with our planet because everyone is too much in denial, and too taken up with their pursuit of Things That Don’t Matter, to band together and do what the scientists are telling them they actually could do to prevent the extinction of every living thing on Earth.
The satire had evolved over the course of five years into a snapshot of the daily horror-show unfolding before our eyes.
Are we capable of looking up and seeing what’s coming?
It’s all too easy to feel helpless. To feel trapped and powerless. To wonder, what can I, as an individual, possibly do to stop this juggernaut?
In his 1958 collection of essays, Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley wrote that “Almost all of us long for peace and freedom; but very few of us have much enthusiasm for the thoughts, feelings and actions that make for peace and freedom.” It would be our failure, he said, to rise to collective action that would doom us.
Does this have to be true?
What if enough people with open eyes were to band together and raise their voices? No, I do not want our country to be one of the world’s bad guys! These are not the policies I want to pay for with our tax dollars. I don’t want to enrich and reward these corrupt and greedy sociopaths who are lining their pockets while children suffer and working people struggle, bereft of the medical care, food, and social services they deserve.
I will not stand by while climate science is ignored and we continue to deplete, despoil, and pollute the Earth!
How do we voice that collective No? Hungary just deposed its fascist leader who was so openly admired by ours. Many other nations have overthrown their evil leaders, and sometimes without bloodshed.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the men in my life. But I don’t want testosterone to be any part of this picture.
Can women rise up collectively and make it happen? Aristophanes gave us the blueprint in his comedy Lysistrata, in the fifth century BCE.
Can the women of the 21st century band together without sacrificing their sons, without any blood being shed?
Hungary did it through an election.
Our elections are still a ways away—and the racist and malevolent forces in our government are doing their best to make sure those elections are neither free nor fair.
Can we give up being polite to our evil leaders long enough to let them hear that tolerance for their utterly short-sighted and disgusting behavior has come to an end?
I would really love to know what you think—and what you’re hoping/planning to do. We need to work together on this. We need to think together, because lots of bright, thoughtful people working together are far more capable of affecting change than any of us can be as individuals.
Your comment will show here if you download the SubStack app (it’s free) and go to my column there. While you’re at it, leave me a heart—because I’m heartsore and in need of all the love and encouragement I can find.
I’ve found so much love, encouragement, and support in this community. It’s late in my life, I know, but I’ve suddenly discovered that I love and need community—and I don’t want to work in isolation any more. Community is my treasure! I discovered this during my travels with the Unsinkable poets in Ireland.
One of my very special friends
The wonderful, talented, and utterly cogent Jackie Fromm, my late mother’s best friend who is part of my very best childhood memories, just turned 103 on May 9th.
Will you join me in sending Jackie my warmest and most admiring birthday wishes? Just this morning, I received a detailed and beautifully composed email from her, describing a fascinating time in her life, in Montreal’s Laurentian Mountains, during the Second World War.
If you write to Jackie on Facebook, she might send it to you…
