Blue Mornings.

I really must stop reading the news in the morning. There’s something odd going on with mornings these days. Every morning after I’ve risen from an oft-truncated sleep I feel weak, tired, dizzy, depressed and dysfunctional. (All of them; no exaggeration.) It usually lasts until lunchtime and seems to have something to do with a reluctance to go through another day.

But I do read the news in the morning. I did so this morning and finally realised something interesting: as much as I feel inclined to keep my distance from most people, for some perverse reason I still care what happens to them. I want little to do with the vast majority of individuals, and yet I still want them to be happy.

The news doesn’t help. It constantly reminds me of one of the core principles of the human condition: that the stupidest people are usually the most arrogant. This morning I read about the Greenlanders’ response to Trump’s desire to treat them as ‘just another real estate deal.’ They remember that time in 1953 when the Americans ordered the local Inuit to leave their homes within four days because the land was needed for an expansion to a US airbase. That sort of thing doesn’t die with the individuals involved; it enters folklore and stays there. And there was a reference to Trump calling the Danish Prime Minister ‘nasty.’ It seems to me that she was nowhere near as nasty as she should have been, but then she’s probably more intelligent, considerate and diplomatic than Trump. Most people are.

I shouldn’t read emails either. This morning I received one from my daughter who is suffering badly on various fronts, and there’s nothing I can do about it.

And all these difficulties seem to stem from one fundamental cause – not fitting in with a world run by fools and psychopaths obsessed with wealth and power regardless of the effect they have on the lives of people and the state of the planet.

And therein lies another of my difficulties: for as much as my body lives a narrow little life deep in the English countryside, my mind will insist on stretching to the furthest corners of the globe. And what I see there has too much about it which is dirty, disreputable, downtrodden and destructive.

But at least my tribe of little sparrows looks as bright as ever today. I suppose their secret is that they don’t care what happens beyond the confines of the garden they call home. Maybe they know something about life which we humans have forgotten.