Despite All Odds

Today, I wanted to write about peaches, mostly the unnamable pleasure and luxury of eating a melt-in-your-mouth drippy sweet peach. I wanted to write about peaches and raspberries and blueberries and strawberries and pie and sunflowers.  About the things of summer that fill my heart. I wanted to write about sweetness and joy, and the human being’s astonishing capacity to care and love, despite all odds.

Today, I read about Gaza, Israel and Palestine, that the Colorado River Basin is drying up, that tornadoes are blazing trails through the Midwest, about the refugee crisis at the Texas-Mexico border, and the unprecedented numbers of hungry children in the US. About the other things that fill my heart.

And today, I am reminded of the utterly reliable way mindfulness helps navigate this perpetual stream of joys and sorrows. Through increasing awareness, curiosity and the willingness to be with the complex, intricate and incomprehensible, the beautiful and tragic, we expand our tolerance and capacity to show up for it all.  

Sitting down, feeling my feet on the ground, the breath coming and going without my interference, being with exactly what is as it is, knowing I cannot end war, fix or change the climate or the crises of social justice. But I can be courageous enough to see it. And today, that is enough.

“The biggest gift you can give is to be absolutely present, and when you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares? The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that. That is what is going to unleash our intelligence and our ingenuity and our solidarity for the healing of our world.” 

― Joanna Macy