Believing In Good

It gets to me. I don’t pay attention to every little thing that is reported.  To each misspoken word, or the horrifying ones.    I vote and I send emails to the  White House and my representatives when I feel the need.  I join a protest when I can.

I try to be informed without letting the hype take over my emotional life.  I will not give politicians who are in office or running for office the power to rule my emotions.  I will not live in fear of what might happen.  I will not engage in the madness.

First Bidens disastrous Debate performance  now a shooting and assassination attempt on Trump.  My mind leaps and bounds on how each will react, on  what will happen next.

But I try to reel it in.

I don’t have a god I believe in.  But I need a place to go when I’m in distress.

So I go to the idea of  Good.   Yesterday Jon and I sat in silence and I thought of the people at the Trump rally and Trump himself (who I have nothing good to say about)  and in the tradition of “Loving Kindness”  wished them healing and well being.

Then as I sat next to him, Jon went online and  bought some food for the Cambridge Food Pantry.

Thinking good, doing good.

Because I don’t want to be a hater.  Because it feels better to put good out into the world than bad.   I don’t actually know if it makes a difference, but it is what I believe in.

Then I went outside.  I walked barefoot on the grass, sat with the trees and listened to the birds.  I watched the wind dance the flowers and grasses in the marsh.  I weeded my garden to sooth my restless hands and tossed what I pulled over the fence for the donkeys and sheep to eat.

I thought…this is what’s real.

It is in nature that I find the natural flow of life.  The beauty and the disease, the baby birds that fly from the nest and the ones that fall to their death, the hollyhocks that still flower even with the rusty pock marks on their leaves, the spindly plant growing inside the compost bin.

And this gives me solace.  Not that everything will turn out the way I want it to, or that all will always be well, but that things will continue on.  And it is in that there is hope.