Words fail. Daffodils don't.

I keep starting to write about this week's craziness but my sentences tend to end in helpless sputtering. The student who wrote---!! The administrator who said---!!! The colleague who claimed---!!!!!

I mean, I can't even with these people. And when we have people in positions of authority feeling empowered to say out loud in public that anyone who criticizes the current administration ought to be immediately fired, I just don't have the words.

But I have the daffodils. They're blooming beautifully. Yesterday I took a chair down to the thickest part of the daffodil patch and sat there trying not to think for a while. Consider the daffodils of the field! They toil not, neither do they spout senseless garbage in meetings!

I wandered lonely as a cloud that doesn't have to attend three hours of meetings on its sole non-teaching day. There was no wind so the daffodils weren't dancing, but at least they were quiet and nondemanding and unlikely to point a finger of blame at me--or at anyone, really. We've got way too much random blame floating around campus right now. Some of us need to take a lesson from the daffodils and spend some time in the sun simply being there.

So I have no words. I have no wisdom. I have no poetry. But I have daffodils, and that's not a small thing.