Antidotes for Angst and Despair

For days, weeks even, I have been thinking of trying to address as honestly and straightforwardly as I can why I usually support liberal causes over conservative causes and why I have become increasingly cynical about politics and the possibilities of change in the way we are governed.  I envisioned a series of such exploratory posts, and yesterday I wrote the first one, addressing my changing perspective on religion. And then I lost the entire post because I was using the updated Blogger interface, which evidently doesn't save drafts automatically as the older interface does. Or perhaps the loss of the post was due to some error of my own. Whatever the cause,  nothing I could do resulted in my being able to retrieve the lost essay. So I surrendered to the capriciousness of technology and took a walk instead. Later I recorded some details of that walk with photos and a post that turned out quite differently than I had originally intended.

I have found, however, that experiencing--and recalling--details of the natural world helps me maintain perspective when confronted with political landscapes where alliances are constantly shifting, where people say what they don't believe, don't believe what they say, say they believe what facts and figures can't support, or massage facts and figures to conclude what they wish from them, or just make up stuff and hope that saying it over and over will convince people of its veracity. (Unfortunately, research shows that this last strategy works.)

So a day when I get online and read that even a career Republican Congressional staffer thinks that the Republican party is now "full of lunatics" or that "the average voter spends only 5 minutes thinking about for whom to vote for Congress," I know that's a day I need to leave despair at the keyboard and get outside.

A camera can be distracting if I am constantly snapping photos so that the initial experience is distanced and delayed to later viewing. But having a camera in hand can also help me to focus on sights I might otherwise overlook: the mushroom covered in tiny brown fibers that look like furry hair, the fly with red eyes perched on an autumn-blooming flower, the photography-worthy gate to one's neighbor's yard, slender green limbs heavy with purple beauty berry, a dragonfly posing patiently on a blue-black salvia bloom. Just small moments of awe and beauty can help restore my equilibrium.

However, I'm afraid that all my antidotes to angst and despair--immersing myself in the natural world, gardening, crafting things, writing--have limited efficacy and must be administered frequently. The next news cycle requires another dose.

 For an enlarged view of the dragonfly I photographed today on my patio, click on the photo.