But more than just my world has been rocked lately… I am sure as you read this your own peaks and valleys come to mind and if you’re like me, you can’t help but place them on a global map. You can’t help but think of the mothers who are unable to hold their babies because of bombs or barricades. 

You don’t need me to inform you that the world is losing its ever-loving mind. You don’t need me to name the threats to our existence, much more to our souls that are ever unfolding and seemingly ceaseless. And I will never say it’s pointless to name what is True. It’s good and right to say that withholding baby formula from a starving population or ripping a child from his mother or starting another war for dominance and control are evil. But… I am very wary of being tricked into believing that any one person or group owns its genesis.

It seems like the vast majority of the “conversation” about Gaza, ICE, Epstein, Iran (etc. etc. the horrors persist), seems more like a game of volleyball where nobody’s spike is as sharp as they think it is and everyone is running around kicking sand into each other’s eyes. Outrage echoes in chambers to crescendo, but I can’t see what good is being done by any of it. Maybe there is some, but I don’t see it. 

And it’s not what I feel called to. I don’t want to play that game, even when I really do want to play it. I point fingers enough to know that it isn’t a fruitless endeavor, but the fruit is sweetly rotting and will fill your gut with maggots. It feels good in the moment to ruminate on the ways I’ve been wronged by other people or systems or what you might call fate or to adjudicate who is at fault and satisfy my biases with this group or that.

But the truth is that this mess is all of ours. I came from the tradition of “original sin” and while I no longer assume the identity of a worm, I don’t think it’s really arguable that we, as a species, have some fucking problems. The prevalence of violence and violation amongst ourselves is too obvious to ignore. Even the way it feels good to sit in judgement of each other over what’s wrong (those damn Trump voters, the pesky libs, the global elites) indicates the dis-ease with which we’re afflicted. Together. All of us. 

Evil, it turns out, is a seed in my own heart just as it is in the best and worst of us.

Okay, I know that took a sharp turn. But it’s part of the update because it’s heavy on my heart right now as I watch my baby crawl way too early and teach my son to read and get my daughter signed up for driver’s ed against a backdrop of a fractured and decaying civilization. And my hunch is that it’s on yours, too. That as you read this with your coffee and a full day ahead or in bed because you haven’t sat down since 7am, you share this sense of responsibility and this sense of helplessness, too. You love this place because all of your most beloved things are in it, but you hate it, too, and wish the tragedies would just stop.

I guess I want to end this with an encouragement I believe is True, but need reminding of myself: that the time spent attending to and engaging in the life in front of me is not only not wasted, but vital to the health of All of Us. That you or I cannot snap our fingers and restore what all those mothers in Gaza have lost or soothe the fear in schoolchildren who see ICE officers roaming around or make the missiles headed toward more civilians disappear. We can’t turn guns into plows on our own. 

But we can do our best to be here and love well and the ripples from this spot will touch the spot you’re in and yours will touch mine and they’ll all reach those places that are most devastated and broken, too.

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