Wishing...

that President Carter or former Secretary of State James Baker had accompanied the current Secretary of State on her latest trip, to talk rather than to threaten discuss the hows and whys of sanctions, reminds me of these lines from Wendell Berry's "The Peace of Wild Things", written during another time, another crisis:

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. ...

Time to go and lie down.