The cover of this week’s “Time” magazine is covered in duct tape, and dread and fear make up the news as our young people are deployed to the Middle East.
Not an encouraging time, one might say, and yet I feel encouraged on this spring-like day in February. It really looks as if there may be an end to winter sometime in the future, millions across the globe said yes to peace, and, to top that, I found out my daughter and her husband are having a baby.
These are normal events – my father dies and in the next breath a new one will be born, God willing. I always add this, like my Egyptian friends who say “in shalla” or God willing, after almost everything including dinner plans.
It is a challenge to hold onto hope, overcoming the pull to despair, but the signs are all around.
On my morning walk to the big white pine, where both my parent’s remains now rest, I see deer tracks that appear to originate from the spot where their ashes are buried.
It looks like a doe and her young one. I spot the distinctive two pronged tracks in my path as I walk through the woods, following them back to the base of the tree. I look up through the branches of the towering pine, and then out to where so many younger trees are sprouting in various stages of growth.
When my mother died several years ago, and we were all gathered at the tree, Dad pointed out the thick woods full of pines, all seeded from the big one with most of them springing up to the east of the tree, “sent by the prevailing winds.”
So we now await the birth of a new family member, welcomed with such love and hope. I think it is the highest expression of hope to have a child in these difficult times.
The prevailing winds, I have to believe, will still bring love and hope and peace, God willing.
We are poised on the verge of war, but so far, as I write this, we are not at war. There were millions of people last week who said they are hoping for a peaceful solution to a thorny problem. War is a failure, violence is always a failure.
When I worked with abusive families in New Mexico, we tried to help those men and women realize that when they struck out violently in anger it was a sign of their helplessness, their impotence, of their inability to peacefully solve their thorny problems. Talking is better than hitting.
I do not ignore the reality that there are people in this world who have no conscience, no morality, or a such a twisted morality that it allows them to hurt others. We need our police and jails; we need defense.
But I am heartened that President Bush has appeared to have taken the advice we always gave those parents to take a deep breath and count to ten before doing something one might regret. I have to believe we can still reach a peaceful solution, God willing.
Feb. 3, 2003