It's been an emotional week.
I'm grateful to have hit some layers of anger toward my father, and toward our larger paradigm, and to finally really feel it. Oddly, my dad wasn't overtly violent, and yet what I've become totally overwhelmed by in the last week is the violence everywhere in our culture, not just the obvious spots. I'm almost at the point of discontinuing my television watching altogether. It's not the handful of relatively harmless competitions that until recently I could still stand ("The Voice", "Antiques Road Trip", "Project Runway"). What has become unwatchable and unbearable are the accompanying advertisements, promoting fear in a host of forms, other, more violent shows and movies (even for children!), conflict in the form of sports, and unsustainable products. It's like we are voluntarily creating war zones, outside of actual war zones. Why do we do it? My anger floods through me, but then segues to grief and sadness when I think of how many people are harmed, and how much of this toxicity I have "consumed" in 68 years (in addition to the actual struggles of my own life). In my own body, I can feel the toxicity and pain multiplied by 8 billion people, plus the planet at my feet. It is almost overwhelmingly heavy.
Yet the hummingbird feeder is attracting bird after bird after bird, and hummingbirds represent "joy". Just plain joy. My job for the coming days? Try to be like a hummingbird, if only for a few minutes a day -- to try to restore a little balance. And to remember that joy, beauty and love are the hallmarks of the era we are entering.
