How to Love a Day Like Today

Love in the face of the Las Vegas ShootingIn the face of the senseless Las Vegas shooting, how do we get through a day like today?

I felt frozen most of the day, the horror buttressed by the president’s hypocritical and milquetoast response.

How do I get through a day in which the acid undercurrent of anger and instability that has been pouring out of spirits for the last year seems to have suddenly rained down in bullets on innocent people?

In the face of the Las Vegas shooting — after the devastation of the hurricanes and along with the ongoing peril in our leadership — despair seems like a logical place to take up residence.

After all, we’ve wrecked our planet. We’ve lost the ability to share values with our brother and sister Americans. We remodeled our lives around fear. We are abandoned children who cannot remember what “safe” even felt like.

“There is force in the universe, which, if we permit it,
will flow through us and produce miraculous results.”
? Mahatma Gandhi

Now is the time for love

I’ve been languishing in anger and despair since this country elected its own version of the DTs. I’ve felt myself screaming. I’ve heard myself dressing down family, friends and strangers alike. I’ve vowed a broken vow to never apologize again.

I feel my own persistent radicalization rising like bile in my spirit.

Love is the only antidote. 

There is no “when it happens” or “if it happens.” Hard times — destruction, desolation and despair — have arrived at our doorstep. And they have made themselves at home in our mess.

Love is the only remedy.

The bell has been rung and and so many are resting back against the curves of its reverberations, wishing and hoping to be carried safely away.

Love is the only life raft.

How to Love (on) a Day Like Today

I am tired. I can’t think about doing anything. Not today.

Today I will breathe and listen to my daughter play the violin and watch the pink stain the sky as the the sun sets.

But tomorrow. Tomorrow after a good night’s rest, I will get myself ready. Ready to wade the flood waters of despair and to act.

Love is not a feeling, a rhetorical device, an idea. Love is action, and it is the balm of fear, the cure for despair.

“’Tis a sigh that is wafted across the troubled wave
’Tis a wail that is heard upon the shore
’Tis a dirge that is murmured around the lowly grave
Oh, hard times come again no more”

from the folk song “Hard Times (Come Again No More)” 

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