A pre-blog message….I know we all feel pressed for time depending on the circumstances of our life or our day. Sometimes I think about listening to a podcast or reading blogs but I don’t have an hour…so that led me to create “Under 10.” Sometimes we need advice, some insight, understanding, to feel heard….we don’t want to be alone…and we want to know others share our struggles and concerns. We need a pack, a tribe…a belonging.
What if you could get that in Under 10 minutes? I don’t have an hour but I have 10 minutes….on the way to the doctor or grocery store or picking up kids from school. My blog and podcast are designed to connect with you for 10 minutes or longer, but 10 is all the time you need…10 minutes to feel…whatever you need to feel…and know that you are heard and understood. I know you’re hurting, maybe confused…you’re sad, angry, hopeless, feeling lost, or maybe found. That’s the new format and I know we can do a lot in Under 10…let’s start with this blog I entitled…
“Some Messy Ass World”
I’ve been working on a blog about Ash Wednesday, which I started almost three weeks ago when Lent started….clearly I’m on the struggle bus with it.. I generally have lots of ideas to write about..lists of ideas…the problem comes when it’s time to write and there’s big news in the world that draws my attention away. Such as…Ukraine. Russia. WTF! What is happening in the world and what is Russia thinking? Maybe no one knows. The news from Ukraine is devastating and the images of bombed buildings and people lying dead on the street are unpalatable. The world seems completely out of control. I find that I can only watch or listen to small bits of news before I sink into a dark abyss. I can’t NOT watch or listen because it’s too important…too devastating. What kind of member of the human race am I if I turn my back to, and my mind off from, the acts of war committed by Russia against Ukraine? I would not be a human being that I could live with…thats for sure.
Glennon Doyle has said, (this is my version of what she said), that she’s not too sensitive…she’s a deeply feeling person in a messy world…me too. I watch the news and can’t eat because I’m sick to my stomach. What kind of person bombs apartment buildings and a children’s hospital and maternity ward? I won’t easily forget the very pregnant mother I saw being carried out on a stretcher…learning later that she had died. She and her baby…when she found out her baby was dying she died too. There are mass graves because so many have died, and are dying, as the bombing continues. There are dead bodies on the street…men, women, and children. Who bombs children? As I ask that question I realize that we have done that…the United States has done that…has bombed areas where there were innocent woman and children. We say it was “collateral damage”…the unintended consequences of war. But bombs are not unintended or accidental…they are very intentional acts of war.
What is happening to make one nation think they can take the land of another nation? Why does any one nation or people decide they know best how another country should be run? We’ve helped remove people from office in other parts of the world….we decided that would be best, like Saddam Hussein. Now, before anyone blows a gasket, I understand that there are people who have done horrific, unspeakable things to their own people throughout history.
When people who had been enslaved in this country were freed they were given land so they could make a living and feed their families…it wasn’t much, but it was something acknowledging their brutal mistreatment. Then we took it back…took all of it back, why?…because we wanted it…so we took it. We took this land from Native Americans. We slaughtered men, women, and children. Women and children were stolen and made the property of white people. Now the have reservations…I’m sure they feel whole from that. Why would I think that my beliefs should be the standard for what everyone else should think? Why are we so afraid of differences? We say we celebrate diversity but really I think we crush it and avoid it…we try and think it out of existence.
I think Einstein said that doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result is the definition of insanity….well we’re super crazy! WWI, WWII, Hitler, concentration camps, Jewish people killed by the hundreds of thousands, gay people rounded up and murdered, Japanese internment camps, Idi Amin, Vietnam, Korea, Desert Storm, Afghanistan, Iraq, famine, starvation, malnutrition, school shootings, police shootings, murders, sexual assaults, poverty, homelessness…the list goes on and on…and not just us, it’s all over the world. The world has lost its collective mind.
Two of my teenage grandchildren asked me when I became so “peaceful” and said I was like Buddha…not even gonna touch the flaws in that comparison. I told them that I used to have a really quick and horrible temper…sometimes I still do. I told them about a “fight” I had in high school. (I use quotation marks with “fight” because that’s what they do…bunch of smart asses). A girl, who was mad at me from calling a foul on her in PE class, walked by me at my locker and kicked me. I told her not to do it again, so of course she immediately did. I grabbed the neck of her shirt and pushed her into an open locker…now I had no plan past that. As I was holding her against the locker, she punched me in the jaw. Now for the big climax…what did I do? I walked away and went to class…Spanish as I recall. My grandchildren laughed at my “fight” and told me, “Nana that’s not a fight. You left!” Of course I did, I’m not stupid. Although I will say that girl, Ann Vogel, did not come back to her locker the rest of the day and she was never mean to me again. Maybe she scared herself as much as she scared me.
How can the world not be crazy when WE are crazy? We do crazy shit like fighting, shooting, arming ourselves for conflict just to walk down the street. When did we decide to shoot people instead of walking away…or talking to them? When did we decide that if we don’t like you we’ll just kill you? To go into a nightclub and execute members of the LGBTQ+ community? To go into a high school, middle school, an elementary school and slaughter people? To run over or brutally beat people for peacefully protesting?
When did we decide that “our way” was right and everyone else was wrong? How do churches decide they have the authority to dispense “the” truth, which is just what they believe…instructing us about what God thinks and wants? Seems pretty clear from all sources and traditions that God wants us to love and care for each other…Shouldn’t it be simple?
So many have come before us to show us another way…a better way. A way not based on any one religion or ideology but on love…love, kindness, compassion…seeing the basic goodness in people. How far from your own basic goodness do you need to be to bomb people’s homes…hospitals…to bomb pregnant women and children? How could we be that far away…losing touch completely…with our own basic goodness? How do we rationalize that?
All these questions and not one damn answer….I just don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows.
But then…there’s Gandhi…”an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.” HH the Dalai Lama…”where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of peace” and “The way to change others’ minds is with affection, and not anger.” Jesus…”a new commandment I give you: Love one another.” Buddha…”with our thoughts we create the world”…”in this world hate never dispelled hate, only love can dispel hate.” Muhammad…”none of you truly believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” Martin Luther King…”I have decided to to stick to love…hate is too great a burden to bear.”
Tomorrow is the 1 year anniversary of the shooting at our King Soopers here in Boulder. A man just walked into the store at 2:30 pm and randomly began shooting people. Ten people were murdered that day. The store was closed for a year and reopened last month. It will close tomorrow in remembrance of those victims. When I heard what was happening last year, I remember hoping and praying that none of my grandchildren were there…that was my first thought…well, first after “what the fuck?!” It felt surreal. Once I knew my grandkids were okay, I set about making sure that all the people that I care about were safe….so many other people did that same search only the results for them were tragic. Who gets shot at the grocery store? Who gets bombed in a children’s and maternity hospital?
So many questions with no clear answers. I heard a Ukrainian journalist, Igor Novikov, on Deadline: White House the other day. He was talking about the war, his concerns for the safety of his family and how overwhelming the entire situation is. Then he said “you can only look at so many pictures of dead children before you realize you can’t do anything about it.” That statement made me want to scream, cry, and throw up. I want to do something about it…I need to because this is intolerable.
The helplessness we feel is hard to stomach…it’s not a feeling that we are comfortable feeling or sitting with. We want it to go away. That desire to be comfortable again can lead us to many misguided and sometimes tragic decisions….those choices may end our suffering for a moment but in the end make everything worse…we get angry in traffic, cut someone off, cause an accident…can’t tolerate a relationship ending so we destroy property or physically harm the person we blame for our pain…cheat at school, at sports, in a relationship and end up with devastating, life altering consequences for yourself and others…we don’t like a particular group of people…we don’t like how they look, what they believe, who they love…we don’t like the way they are “different” than us and so we take violent action against them and destroy many lives, including our own.
This pain, this helplessness and lack of control, that we feel we can’t bear, is the very thing that transforms us…makes us kinder, more compassionate, more accepting and loving…softer. Being softer feels horrible right now…it feels dangerous.
Now to be real…it will never be okay, in any world, to have children dying in war zones or in buildings targeted for bombs. That will never feel okay because it isn’t ok and never can be. I have questions…we have questions that may never be answered…there is no adequate explanation that can reassure us about what is happening right now…there is no reassurance.
That’s a lot in Under 10….a lot of questions…discomfort…fear…guilt…sadness…uncertainty…and the only thing we can do, the only healthy thing we can do is feel all the feelings and allow them to change, soften, and expand us…so we can be more and do better…so we can become the change we want to see in the world…become the kindness, compassion, and love we want to see and feel.
So let’s be real…all I can say is, I don’t know…I can’t explain what’s happening in the world or in this country. I don’t know if anyone can…not really. I do know one thing, what doesn’t kill us can transform us and make us kinder…more compassionate…softer, in all the ways we need…if we let it.
Sit with that.
Kai Raines 