An inscrutable brand of optimism and another poem.

This year: some victories and some defeats, human race. But we are brave and we adapt. We recycle our garbage. We try again.And if that doesn't do it for you then know inevitably just like every dominant species before, eventually we'll be gone. This beautiful blue marble will subsume us and our refuse and something new will get a few spins around the sun. (Then the sun will turn into a red giant and then a white dwarf I think and things kinda fall apart? Don't worry we'll all be dead.)YES I AM an optimist. Don't give me a hard time.Between the time that I knew I had melanoma with not great survival statistics and my first surgery (a few weeks nearly a year ago) I would do some yoga every night and lay in corpse pose and think about dying. The uncoupling of my molecules and rearranging of my atoms and how that would be a good way to stay on in this world. I'm not gone I'm just different.Weird mantra, right? Weird times. And I do believe it, the conservation of matter. I'm a gardener (though looking upon my gardens would make Martha Stewart throw up). Composting is a feature of life here and using it as a metaphor for purification and renewal scratches an itch. This is more a spring poem, but here it is in the spirit of the renewing the year.Excerpt from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, "This Compost"3.Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corpses,It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.