Finding Light (3/13/22)
We are two weeks into the war in Ukraine and the stories and images continue to be heartrending. There are no words for the atrocities of bombing maternity hospitals, slaying innocent children, and terrifying a whole country. The scale and brutality of Russia’s invasion leave most of us breathless and the death and destruction drag us deeper into darkness. The air we struggle to breathe is laden with worry, horror, and helplessness. We wonder how we live in such a dark world. Yet in a week the calendar will thrust spring upon us and coupled with daylight savings we will be awash in days of increasing light. The essence of spring is rebirth and nature’s emergence from the dark winter. We must seek our light.
Margaret Renkl pens about finding light in darkness in her beautiful NY Times essay “What to Do With Spring’s Wild Joy in a Burning World”. As she passionately awaits spring she describes how “we don’t deserve a March like this. We have tortured the earth so thoroughly and for so long that we deserve only the hungry lions of March.” She describes that “the world is burning, and there is no time to put down the water buckets.” Yet she beseeches us to “for just an hour, put down the water buckets anyway. Take your cue from the bluebirds, who have no faith in the future but who build the future nevertheless, leaf by leaf and straw by straw, shaping them and turning them into a sheltering roundness perfectly fitted to the contours of the future they are making.”
When Jessica Craven visited us last week, she reminded us that “we can’t turn away from the dark, but we can choose to view it from the side of light”. She was inspired by the work we do every day to save our democracy and reaffirmed our belief that the antidote to feeling hopeless is being engaged and active.
Our democracy and planet need daily care. Every colorful postcard we write shines brightly in a voter’s mailbox and tills the soil of their civic engagement. The candidates we meet and speakers we hear are the sounds of tending to democracy.
Read the shout-out Jessica Craven gave MFD in her newsletter after her visit. Join us to hear Bill McKibben on April 4 (RSVP below). Wake up your network out of their winter sleep to join our giving circle or write a postcard with us. Desmond Tutu once said, “hope is being able to see that there is light despite all of the darkness”. Together we can make the days a little brighter.