When you walk out your front door and realize you’ve invited the entire world of human misery and suffering for breakfast…

And it arrives as a giant sinkhole in your front yard.

What can be done? Where can you hide?

Would it be alright to slip out the back door? What if there’s a sinkhole there too, lurking beneath the weeds and grass?

You won’t find it until you’ve stepped off the porch, right?

The one out front is gaping and large, you can’t miss it, but out back, who knows?

An observation, a thought to derail me from the gaping abyss, gratefully comes to rescue me from my existential dilemma.

Did you know that shamrocks, also known as four-leaf clovers, open and shut with the setting and rising of the sun? I did not know they behaved like flowers until this very morning.

Yesterday, I plucked one four leaf clover, my lucky talisman from the patch while doing yard work. I brought it inside and put it in its very own miniature vase of water and set it on the table.

Now, as I write this, bleary-eyed from a 3 am internal wake up call to rise and change the world, I peek over the top of my iPad to see my four-leaf rescue, my clover in its sleeping state. Leaves folded together, upward in what reminds me of a meditation or prayerful pose.

Do four-leaf clovers pray for us, for humanity? Is that why they are considered to be ‘lucky”?

I surely hope they do, because today, I need all the help I can get.

S Lynn Knight