The hardest part

We’re okay. We’re okay. We’re okay.

I was up at 4 am today, the air thick with the smoke of wildfires whipped by winds that never travel east to west but did this time, gusting to 75 mph, downing trees and power lines, sparking fires that roared through forests, that incinerated entire towns, that burned three historic covered bridges. The sky yesterday was yellow-brown. The sun, when is appeared through the ashen gauze, was color or orange sherbet. You could stare right at it. But you wouldn’t because the smoke burned your eyes and the ash was falling on your hair and it felt like the world was coming to an end. Like after the cruelty and misanthropy of Trump; after the revelations that were not revelations at all about deep, entrenched, fear- and hate-based inequalities; after the virus and the Depression-level unemployment; after all we had endured…there was more. How could there be more? Hadn’t there been enough?

I woke thinking this. Knowing that millions of humans in other places have endured so much worse, decades of draught, starvation, war. But somehow that didn’t make this easier. It just makes me feel guilty about feeling so powerless, so discomfited by what might legitimately be called (except for the virus) First World Problems.

I thought maybe I could ease myself back to sleep by listening to one of the mediations on InsightTimer, my go-to/ go-to-sleep app. I listen, in times of need, when the wounds ache, to Sarah Blondin. I listened to Life is Kind, which has never failed to soothe my soul. Then I listened to A Message of Hope, a new offering. I wanted to share (in my words, based on hers) a bit of that one. It did not get me back to sleep. But it reassured me that at that moment when you think you’re done, you are not.

We have already gone through the hardest thing we will ever go through: to be pushed from the comfort on our mother’s womb into the light of day, into a bright, loud world we do not understand, into an unfamiliar place where we are forced to engage, adapt and change, again and again. To encounter the new and to deal with it, learn from it, grow from it, embrace it. Take pleasure in it. So a part of us is okay with these chaotic times we are living through. A part of us knows how to move through this with grace.

With grace, then, my friends. And with strength.