Salve of Hope and Healing

Fog closes in as the warm air mingles atop the rapidly melting snow. This is spring, or a step towards it anyhow. There will still be steps back into winter. This is how seasonal change comes. Two steps forward and one step backwards. Indeed, perhaps this is how most change comes — in fits and starts, the result of slow plodding steps in one particular direction. Periodically, we try to step backward for reassurance that the past has not dissolved before we have found a solid future to stand on. An occasional detour takes us around obstacles, but motion continues. This is how we age, reliably and subtly. This is how friendships develop or dissolve, slowly and steadily. This is how war planes have come to drop bombs on neighborhood hospitals. That which was once unfathomable has become reality.

Detours, aging and friendships seem like inevitable progression of the human experience. I do not accept the war plane reality as inevitable, yet here we are. Greed, fear and resentments arose slowly and surely to a time and place where wars of all sizes smolder in homes, villages and cities across this beautiful planet. People are hurting each other, killing each other. Surely human conflict has existed for as long as there have been humans, but the tools we currently have for hurting each other are diverse and devastating. I can not settle in this reality.

I find myself wanting to walk quickly through this stage of human existence, into a different reality. Actually, walking is not enough; I want to run, get to the other side as fast as possible. But really, running feels more like running away rather than running through. And I can’t turn away from it. The hurt of the human heart did not grow in a day; it will not resolve in a day. This hurt calls me to hold it tenderly and fiercely, wrapped in the arms of hope. The suffering and the solution are within me and in everything that I put out into the world.

So I will hold and honor the suffering as a necessary part of the healing. I will continue to walk towards a different future, surely and confidently. I will offer words and actions that reflect the Love and Light underlying the human spirit, the universal spirit. I will transmute the greed and fear that grip me by leaning into forgiveness, love and compassion. I will live it in my daily life, and work with others to cultivate it in our educational, political and corporate structures. I am sure we can develop a social mindset that welcomes and embraces the the human spirit. Beneath the greatest acts of heroism and the worst acts of terror, resides the same potential for love and goodness. When we embrace the humanity, indeed, the divinity, that resides with each of us, it feels possible that we will begin to unlock the potential to heal human relationships with one another and with the planet.

Rising with the sun,

I too offer light and heat.

Gifts of love,

salve of hope and healing,

nourishment for our hurting planet.

There is a kind of change that comes so fast you don’t see it coming – and sometimes hardly remember what it replaced. This is the change of snowstorms that cover the field overnight. This is the change of an empty house crumbling and the corner store closing. This is the change held in the crocus that pops up from the ground in the warmth of a morning. This is the change of people rising everywhere to recognize the humanity in each other person with whom they share their time on earth. This is the rapid change that will come when enough people realize that we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.

 

 

 

2 Replies to “Salve of Hope and Healing”

  1. Lisa, thank you for this post.
    I’m holding it in my heart today.
    Also thanks for the reminder of that beautiful song

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