All I have...
on just wanting to connect with you, dear reader
It's all I have to bring today—
This, and my heart beside—
This, and my heart, and all the fields—
And all the meadows wide—
Be sure you count—should I forget
Some one the sum could tell—
This, and my heart, and all the Bees
Which in the Clover dwell.Emily Dickinson
Hi. I hope you’re doing okay. I have been struggling coming up with an idea for this week’s offering, so I thought I would just show up and let my fingers talk. I’m tired. Getting used to a new job on top of my other jobs has been fun in some ways, and exhausting in others. I’m so grateful for it, but I am also tired and feeling like I am surely dropping some balls somewhere, at any given moment.
I miss my kids. I miss their spouses and my grandkids. Even though I see some of them every week. I miss my mom, my dad and my step-mom. A lot. I really miss my brother. I miss his family. I miss my best friend in the whole world, Beth. I miss the world before the internet, before cell phones and Facebook. Honestly, I can barely remember what it was like, except I feel it was far less hectic and just kinder.
My heart aches everyday with news of suffering from pointless wars.
I am so deeply disappointed in my government, in politicians. In the American political climate. In the Democratic Party. In the Republican Party. Most Americans work hard and deserve so much better. As of January 1, 2024 the U.S. Census Bureau projected the U.S. population to be 335,893, 238 souls, and this is the best we’ve got? It is humiliating and embarrassing and unbearable, what a circus it all has become. I miss the decorum and elegance of a real two-party system and the true debate of ideas. I miss the gentility and intelligence of how it used to be, whether it was real or not. I miss the refined and respectable thinkers like Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley Jr., Maya Angelou, Christopher Hitchins, John Rawls, Carl Sagan, whether I agreed with them or not. I really could just cry when I think of the state of the world most days. I have welling tears right this moment—it doesn’t take much these days, because it’s all so much. We need more beauty and kindness and truth and less angry, divisive vitriol and rhetoric. I don’t trust any part of it anymore. I have divorced myself from politics completely because it is just too frustrating and heartbreaking and grotesque. (Please do not leave a comment here that has anything to do with your opinion on politics. Express your sadness in the overall state of things, for sure, but anything divisive will be promptly deleted.)
What I am after here, today, is a symposium of gentleness and an idea bank of how we bolster ourselves and get through the harder, tiring, hope-depleted days, and find some peace and beauty and hope. Are there books you return to again and again? A special place you like to go? A person you like to call and talk to? A creative practice that always sees you through? An activity that never fails to bring some lightness of being and clarity? Let’s create a savings account of ideas in the comments below. For me, right now, my notebook is my private haven. Spending time writing in it brings me a lot of comfort. Seeing my kids and grandkids is a huge source of joy and hope. My evening meal with my sweetheart, enjoying one cocktail, some yummy food, and watching reruns of Northern Exposure is my favourite time of each day. And counting the days until I see my son, daughter-in-law, grandsons, my dad and my step-mom in Ireland. (TWENTY DAYS)
Thank you for being here. Your presence and your subscription allows me to keep writing, which is also a balm. I hope that visiting me here is a balm for you, too.
Your turn.
“Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.” E. B. White
It saddens me to read of you (and my fellow subscribers) feeling so despondent. For myself, I feel nothing but hope—as I would no matter what was going on in the world around me. Mother Theresa said, “Bloom where you are planted” and Gandhi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” I take both of these inspiring people’s messages to heart and try to follow their good advice. If Mother Theresa can bloom in the slums of Calcutta bringing comfort and peace no matter the larger world around her, and if Gandhi can inspire people in the midst of an “occupying” government, then I can surely thrive in the world around me. So, I choose to focus with love and joy on the people I know and who will know me, right on my doorstep, rather than people of any stripe whom I will never meet and who will never know me. In so doing, I am not hiding from the ugliness around me. I’m simply not distracted by it. Instead, inspired by my old yoga teacher, I look for the good around me, rather than the bad (kind of like painting in the negative space). She lived for three years as a five year old child in a POW camp in Java during WWII when her family was captured by the Japanese. In all the squalor and the deprivation and the fear, her mother told her, “See something beautiful, hear something beautiful, and do something beautiful for someone every day.” And so she did, every single day—the drop of rain, the buzz of a bug, a kiss on her mother’s cheek—and she lived without bitterness, never losing joy (and would have done so whether she died in that camp or not). No matter what, I can at least do that in my world. I also draw hope and inspiration these days from a podcast called, “An Army of Normal People,” which highlights so many “nobodies” doing so much good in their little corners of the world. They teach me the world does not need to be perfect to be good. Nor does it need to be done by officials in any institution. And as the basis for my own “activism,” I have learned that the first focus of that energy must be on trying to become a better person myself. Heaven knows there’s plenty to do there! So, every day I try to say, “Let us be up and doing with a heart for any fate!” (It’s my favorite line from one of my favorite Longfellow poems, “The Psalm of Life.”)
I can’t breathe from all the noise. My senses feel assaulted from every direction. I am choosing to limit my exposure to it but is that the answer. Should we jump into the mix and shout our despair for the future? I find solace in my quiet life, art, journaling, family and cats. I am grateful for many things; yet I’m sad for how technology has shaped all the generations after mine (boomer talking). 😍💕🤗