Listen up, month of March. Your days are numbered. Don’t care whether you throw me a lion or a lamb, or if you’re getting ready to spring out of the Ides of March on me like you did to Julius Caesar. Years ago, you gave me the worst day of my life. It started when I was favored to win the 200 breast at the NAIA nationals and missed my event on a day that went downhill from there. And you’ve also given me the best day of my life with an inamorata whose instincts and thought processes are as close to mine as any woman I’ve ever met -- think cross between Taylor Swift and Elin Nordegren, both Nordic Snow Queens in appearance, both extremely intelligent (Swift creates magic and Nordegren was a college Valedictorian).

Lots of other March surprises over the decades, good and bad; but you were named for the god of war (Mars), so there’s that. Two weeks in, so far this year, you’ve given me full-spectrum rainbows, all the way from ultraviolet to infrared. Of course, you’ve been busy conducting a pandemic and running amok politically elsewhere. I thank you – cautiously -- for the white ermine snows of dawn and the long shadows of dusk. The latter send sinewy silhouettes striding across the white lake behind my house with purple majesty at sunset, like the shape-shifting Shadow People of legend, so maybe you’re messin’ with me. Whether djinns or angels or demons, they quicken my pulse whenever Night sweeps her black wing over Cartesian senses. And that awakens my inner radar to the hideous degradations and radiant truths in the nocturnal world around me. The Yin and Yang, right? That’s where I’m vulnerable.

As a romantic idealist, there is nothing more heart-sickening – disgusting, really – to me than seeing the sacred profaned. I’m reminded of ISIS destroying temples and blowing up the icons of human spiritual history, as they did to the statues of Bamiyan, and feeling that nothing could be more grotesque. You can murder the body, inflict physical harm, but to destroy the spirit of something is to devalue and degrade everything that gave it worth. When you cherish something or someone, you raise it to a transcendence beyond mere existence. You invest it with all that you are capable of giving, all that your own worth can bestow. It is the signal object of your collective intelligence, judgment and passion, your holy of holies, your soul itself. And to have that brought low makes you ashamed to witness it. It is bile in the belly of the beast, a drain of blood from your heart. I’m really good at elevating life with romantic idealism (which is like saying I’m really stupid, really vulnerable) so, the relentless debasement of whatever I choose to cherish or invest with magic is a stone in the gut.

The thing about smashing ideals is you can’t undo the damage. You can only neutralize whatever is profane. “If your right hand offends thee, cut it off.” You salvage perfection by devaluing the profane, making it common and meaningless. You do that not so that you can forgive…but so that you can go on loving. And if that sounds like “the hair of the dog” cure, it is.

In a time of great imbalance and little love, acrimonious politics remain just such an open wound. The sides may seem like competing visions for the great American dream, but ideals go down in the flames of reality if they are two-faced. A dream is what you wish for; reality is what you do. Caveat: the wall between them that protects you also imprisons you. Ideals and contradictory reality will never be on the same side of that wall. If you cannot live up to the standards you hold for others, you undermine your credibility; and whatever you achieve is only as secure as what you did to get it. It’s not damage to a dream itself that causes failure. It’s hypocrisy and duplicity. Accept in others what you demand for yourself, and a double standard morphs into the Golden Rule.   

On a bitterly cold day last month, my Facebook Timeline reminded me that six years earlier a gunman had fired on a free speech rally in Copenhagen and Isis had beheaded 21 Christians in the Mideast. I had thought then how lucky we were to live in America where such narrow-minded intolerance could never intimidate us. Just 6 years ago…

And now how sad to see so many desperate, scrambling people fumbling in the politically correct spotlight to save their careers, their families, their reputations. They confess to anything, heap blame on themselves, renounce whatever, apologize -- apologize even for apologizing for others. It’s shades of those stereotypical dictatorships we use to sneer at with their branding of dissenters as mentally ill, their re-education classrooms, their cancellations of all who don’t toe the Party line. Many of our greatest scientists and thinkers – the Einsteins, the Wehrner von Brauns – escaped those countries to come here, cherishing free speech and uncensored media. And now their children find themselves intimidated or coerced into mouthing the correct doctrines or else see themselves blocked/boycotted from commerce and the free exercise of their talents. It seems particularly virulent in the arts and entertainment (and in governance, which, after all, is increasingly political theater under the Big-Top of a Congressional dome). Not that it hasn’t always been strong in the arts. We’ve seen free thinking and free expression demonized before – Hollywood blacklisting in the McCarthy era comes to mind when Tinsel Town was far Right instead of radical Left. Still, the pendulum swung back…and kept going. Is it past the point of no return? With the saturation of media narratives, and perhaps a general dumbing down of ourselves, it seems too steep an intolerance to overcome this time. Censor, cancel, cleanse. Methinks, each of us should burn as few bridges as we can, lest burning witches follows.

The dazzling dozen photos this month are courtesy of sunrises on the ski trails! Love to come snow skating up from the woods into the warmth of that star. Sol, Ra, Helios, Ravi – by any name – the Golden Chariot rears out of the dawn straight at me. I look Apollo in the eyes and he nods. Sometimes I stick my thumb out hitch-hike style and he laughs and cracks his whip over the four fiery steeds. More distant stars demur in the remote firmament, and I head home ablaze with thoughts and inspiration.

Thomas "Sully" Sullivan