Dear Reader:

One positive thing to come out of this period of growing uncertainty is more communication from family and friends. I have talked to my children more in the last couple of days than I have in quite awhile with their earlier  busy & (exhausting) schedules.

We would certainly text or email…but one does miss the human voice with all its inflections of honest dialogue flowing between caring/loving adults and children.

Occasionally I find myself taking a deep breath while clearing the cobwebs from my over-processing brain. I think all of our minds need some good old R&R….we have overtaxed it trying to figure out how to understand and react to certain aspects of this pandemic….when in reality it is beyond the proximity of our allotted space on this planet to do so. When our whole world is afflicted….there is no place to run or hide or even brainstorm collectively.

Yet…like the title says….I am filled with daily divine reassurances that I am suppose to be right here, alongside everyone else on our planet, to experience this rare, once in a lifetime (for that matter…many lifetimes) dilemma far beyond the human capacity to absorb the enormity and complexities of this universal game of coronavirus dominoes. 

Some moments during the day I feel an overwhelming aura of peace consume me and I submerge myself in its sensation. God is present and it is such a relief. Yet, somehow I can’t seem to keep the peace from quietly and softly drifting away as other mundane obstacles interrupt the feeling.

I should have known (from these experiences of late) that God was leading me to a story. I found it in a magazine-Paris Review...about an unknown female author (with her story half written) who for forty years following WWII remained nameless and unsung… until her story emerged from obscurity.

Her name was Etty Hillesum. There was  one powerful, mind-blowing line I discovered (in one of several articles about her)…that correlated with where I am right now in my thinking….trying to contain peace and then pass it on.

“Ultimately, we have just one moral duty,” wrote a young Etty Hillesum shortly before she died at Auschwitz at the age of twenty-nine. “To reclaim large areas of peace in ourselves, more and more peace, and to reflect it towards others. And the more peace there is in us, the more peace there will be in our troubled world.”

That was it! That was what I needed to hear and now do during these troubled times…“Reclaim peace in myself and reflect it towards others.” 

Even within the horrors of the barbed wire walls of Auschwitz Etty Hillesum’s optimism was unwavering. In July 1943 she wrote:

The misery here is quite terrible; and yet, late at night when the day has slunk away into the depths behind me, I often walk with a spring in my step along the barbed wire. And then time and again, it soars straight from my heart—I can’t help it, that’s just the way it is, like some elementary force—the feeling that life is glorious and magnificent, and that one day we shall be building a whole new world.

So until tomorrow….Wouldn’t it be grand to think that out of all the stress, worries, illnesses and death that we, as a world are experiencing together, we can wipe the old slate clean and together build a whole new world….filled with kindness, compassion, acceptance, tolerance, humor and love?

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

*Lachlan had a wonderful birthday on St. Patrick’s Day….Mollie started it with birthday candle in a donut….a winning combination for a five-year-old!

Lachlan got to go to school since he is in a small private pre-school and there the children sang Happy Birthday to him and made his day quite special.