The Birds Are Singing

There was no color in the sunrise this morning. It has been raining for about 20 hours straight. I woke up to the birds singing. They always do. Every morning. Rain or shine. Heat or cold. They sing.

(rainy, foggy morning, by me)

I did not have to rush to get up. Nothing was required of me this morning so I stayed curled up in bed, next to a cat. I listened. To the birds. To my thoughts. To my heart.

I don’t have much to say today, except I feel worn down at the amount of sorrow and sadness I have felt these last few weeks. I get so upset by the violence, the hate and the fear.

Even when there is a ray of goodness and love, there seems to be someone, or a group of people who harbor so much anger, fear and hate, that they even tear love apart.

Fear of change is in there too. Things change all the time. It happens. Why do we fear it?

I don’t have any answers. I am not perfect. I admit to being afraid of change sometimes. But, I am consciously working on that because change is going to happen so I had better learn to cope. I feel anger. But when I look at that, it is only occasionally anger from something I am reacting to personally. Mostly it is anger at hearing or seeing something happen to others that seems cruel, unkind. I fear the unknown sometimes. But there is no way to know what will actually happen in the next minute, so I try not to fall into that trap too.

Then there is fear and hate. I fear open closet doors. Always have. And heights. Hate? I hate hate.

My father was a minister. I understand Christianity as interpreted by the Episcopal Church. As an adult I have let that go. This is a previous post about that: https://kathrynwonders.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/be-soft/

So, I do not fear God, or death. I respect that for others it is different. I adhere to Be Soft.

Religion did and does good things. But at it’s root it can beget violence because it creates an Us/Them scenario. A Right/Wrong script. It creates separation. It allows humans to be violent to protect what is seen as right, correct in the eyes of God. What human knows that?

So, we have Charleston and Kuwait. Good people. In houses of God. Murdered.

In response to Charleston calls rang out to remove the Confederate flag from the Statehouse grounds. Cries of “It’s our heritage. It’s our history.” rang out in response. This is what that heritage and history is, a “new government” that  was to be founded “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” The foundation of white supremacy.

I stayed in bed, curled up with my cat and listened to birds singing and thought.

In the United States our Supreme Court ruled that same sex marriage is a constitutional right under the 14^th amendment. Guess what? People are so upset they say they’ll move to Canada. Which is funny because…..?! What do people think is going to happen when two men or two women get married? The world will not end. God will not strike us dead. There will be more love in the world. Dignity. Equality. Equality means equality. In all states, not some.

I had a young woman ask me if Isis was going to kill us all? That’s not the question, because we are doing it ourselves. ….“ since 9/11, jihadists have killed 26 Americans on U.S. soil, while those with right-wing leanings have killed 39. The single-most deadly event by an Islamic extremist was the 13 people killed at Fort Hood. On the right-wing side of the ledger, the worst was the six people slain at a Sikh Temple in Wisconsin.” (Politifact.org…actually almost any news source) And now we can add the 9 beautiful souls of Charleston.

On top of hate violence and murder, add our country’s poverty, hunger, homelessness, mental health crisis, illiteracy, gun violence, militarization of police and incarceration issues and we have a lot of people suffering.

And I stayed in bed curled up with my cat and listened to birds singing and thought.

There is a huge amount of goodness in the world. I am expecting two new little nieces/nephews this year. People like Bree Newsome exist. Mother Emmanuel Church in Charleston continues to open her doors to anyone. Love wins. People are finding their voices and speaking up through community action, civil disobedience. Conversations and dialog are beginning. Hopefully we are ready to address racism in this country. We are beginning to understand the fragility of this planet and take care of her. There are places in the world where the Milky Way is so close you might feel like you could almost touch it—while possibly understanding the miracle that is this pale blue dot.

Please. We are all human beings. We are all imperfect. We all deserve love, dignity, a chance to live in health, free from suffering and pain. Free from fear of violence. Can we not find a way to work together?

I finally left the cat in bed and got up. The birds are still singing.