It’s Sunday afternoon. Outside the hummingbirds are making last dashes at the feeders swung off the balcony rail. Once in a while one bounces off the wide windows through which I watch. They seem to recover quickly and zoom off — about their business, of living. I’ve wondered what their brain is signalling on such occassions; how this thump, system-shock, disorientation and recovery gets interpreted. They don’t mistrust the experience it seems, since they return, evening after evening.

Inside, my retarded sister-in-law of 55, Debbie, is doing her Sunday puzzles, like a mantra. The solution to each curved side seems to calm her. She certainly has pride of completion – shouting her achievement with words we still don’t understand. On the TV is her boyfriend, Willy Nelson. Why he of all singers, she feels engaged by, we have no idea. Not a Sunday goes by that she doesn’t go to the CD shelf and pull it out and hand it to me, gesturing to where I should put it in so she can hear and see. Sometimes she sings tunelessly along. Today we carved a pumpkin for her. It is lit and grinning on the mantle now. She is more engaged with her puzzle and waiting to “talk” to her brother. She has maybe 30 words we can understand, and strings of sound between them that we presume have sense for her.

Sundays are strange days: simultaneously a day in which I resolutely want to do nothing but nothing– but to stare out the window, to watch a football game, to skim the newspaper– and a day in which I have resolved to catch up with everything: the condominium papers, the 5 chapters for a reading club, the deep analysis of a new book of Kafka interpretation, balancing the checkbook… I want to take a two hour walk and also to nap lazily on the sofa.

We are long past religious here. Maybe we listen to some Gospel on the radio, or Bach from the tuner; we may reflect on how unbelievably fortunate we are, for all our large and petty gripes. Even the large calamities seem manageable; we get through them. A realization burbles, of what thin happenstances separate each of us from Debbie — normalcy from non normalcy; what separates us from Iraqis — a year or ten of religious imposition, of being convinced of alliances with God.

The future does not seem so certain, of course, as our past fortune would predict. More than at any time in my life the long stretch of our American fortune looks to be stretching out less surely before us. During the raucous years of opposition to the US war in Vietnam the anger was about what was happening, not about what might come to be happening. There was much more than the war, of course. The warnings of population growth and what it might bring were upon us. Famine and war was everywhere but they seemed isolated at best, or connected to some eternal perveristy of the human creature at worst. There was not a general sense of being on a moving belt that we could neither stop, not get off. Global climate change was not an idea we were familiar with.

Neither were the US politics of the time quite so obviously bent on the destruction of their own foundations. As despicable as Richard Nixon was, he could seem to be an abberation; adjustment back to decency seemed possible — even to we angry young. What is happening now seems entirely different: those who have power are consumed by it and cannot see the mid-term, much less long term, consequences of their actions.

The elimination of habeus corpus is truly a frightening event. The war in Iraq has no forseeable good consequences. Nuclear North Korea and the likely reactions of South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and China are a crap shoot with no lucky combinations.

But I forget. It is Sunday. A day of rest. If the human body is kept from rest it shuts down. I think the same may be true beyond the 24 hours of night and day. Without days of rest, weekly, or seasonally, days spent in idleness, or celebration, we shut down. It is true. Today Iraqis are dying — because of our President. Yet we must rest. It is true that there are 9 days until elections, which may put a door stop, however feeble, in the closing door of democracy. Yet we must rest.

One small contribution we make by this rest, other than our own recusitation, is that by sloth we contribute very little — even nothing– to the CO2 greenhouse that beyond all the rest threatens our lives as we live them. Perhaps we should return to the old Basque model: Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Sunday… in Euskara of course.

And in the days and hours when we do not rest, we stand on our feet, we raise our voices, we diminish our enemies and add to our friends. We plan for better times to come.