Attached
by Our Roots
“Do
you think there is anything not attached by its unbreakable cord to everything
else?”
Mary
Oliver (Upstream, p.5; Penguin Press, 2016)
Does it
seem to you as if there is just too much going on all the time to keep up? It
does to me. Here we are as a country, in the middle of winter, in the middle of
political upheaval, watching a catastrophe unfold in Europe, and through it all
there is pouring rain, snow and ice causing pileups on the interstates, and
tornadoes crashing and smashing homes and humans. No one knows what will happen
next—are these the opening salvos of World War III? We live in a constant state
of limbo.
The candidates running
for election in Alabama for the mid-terms don’t even try to tell the truth
about anything they say in their commercials, and some of them just make up
lies out of whole cloth. Is this another tactic to keep people from voting? Who
wants to vote for the one who tells the fewest lies? Is that what our democracy
has come to? It conjures up images of my old great granny sitting in our tiny
home in Chattanooga when I was six years old. A commercial for Clorox bleach
was showing on the snowy octagonal screen of our first television and she was
rocking and watching it with keen interest. Finally, she said, “Well, that was
just a big lie.” That was in 1952, y’all—we’ve been lying on television for 70+
years.
There was one big win
yesterday—women’s soccer won their battle for equal pay. It took two thousand,
twenty-two years, but there it is! Here is another little piece of goodness—my friend
Ladonna brought me a big bag of Egyptian cotton fabrics from Cairo—there will
be play! And another: Isie and I are going to try making handmade paper—more play.
All I can say is: when the whole world is blowing up, just pray and play—what else
can you do?
We cannot detach from all
the world’s woes, and neither can we solve them. We all live here on this one
small planet and, as beautiful as it is, we seem incapable of simply living in
peace and enjoying the fruits of our labor. I still believe in the inherent
goodness of the individual human being, and even though there are some very bad
actors, who are simply bent on power and greed, I believe that when the dust
settles, we will come out of our houses in love and good will. We will
recognize our neighbors as well as our connections to the world community. We
will know that our roots are strong and reach deep. And, through them we will
connect with the people of Ukraine and the people of Russia, and the people of
Sudan and Syria and China and everywhere else in the world. We will get there.
This is my hope and my prayer.
In the Spirit,
Jane
No comments:
Post a Comment