Bringing Logic to the Illogical.

It has gotten to the point that I am truly afraid to turn the news on each morning, for it is so disheartening to wake to a new day and hear that more people have been unjustifiably killed, homes and neighborhoods have been looted and destroyed, that buildings, institutions, and privacies have been breeched, and religions and ethnicities judged and juried without pretense.

How does one explain all of this civil unrest to their children in a manner that makes sense to them?

I suppose one could choose to ignore it and pretend that their children are not being adversely affected by the state of the world outside their homes, but that comes with great risk as I have learned that my boys are more informed than I am on most days. While I naively think they are compliantly doing school work or playing online with their friends, in reality, they are navigating their ways around the internet absorbing all of the news and images. So, it has become my job to distill and explain the information and images that they are viewing. As I have been struggling to bring a sense of reason and logic to all that is happening in the world to my teen age sons, I have come to realize that everyone is living, responding, and reacting from a place of fear and anger. People are angry that they are not being seen or heard, and feeling dismissed, ignored, and invisible is a horrible feeling. They fear that their liberties are being taken away, that they will not be able to make ends meet, that things will never go back to normal, and all of these fears have been simmering for months. I am not immune to these fears- I fear the world that will be left for my children, I fear the education that they are receiving, I fear the ideologies that they are picking up from the World Wide Web. However great my fears are, I refuse to live from a place of fear. I have chosen to see the positive in the seemingly negative. Rather than be terrified that I am the head of the home school that my boys are enrolled in, I am grateful that I get to spend so much time with them. Instead of fearing for my husband's life every time he goes to work for our country, I am grateful that he has a job that provides for us. I have had to learn to seek out and illuminate the good in the world, for I believe that is the only way that we will all come together and get through such a divided and difficult time.

I vividly remember the camaraderie that abounded in our country following the terrorist attacks on 9/11. There was such a swelling of pride for our country and everyone came together to help one another. It was the burst of sunlight in a very dark day in our nation's history. I often tell my boys about that day and what it was like to experience such justified fear and how we, as a country, didn't let it defeat us. We kept going and came out even stronger.

I sincerely hope that we as a nation can get back to that and that we can begin to sew up the very large tear in the fabric of our country. We must all stop for a moment and realize that we are all people- we are all flawed and one of us is not better than another.

I truly believe that if we, as a collective whole, come together, we can begin to right the ship. Tonight, I will be conducting a Reiki session with others with the intention of sending positive and loving energy out to all of those who need it at this time. While you're settling down for the evening tonight, take a few minutes to sit and join us in expanding the healing energy that is needed for us all to start to come together. I always tell my boys that the easiest thing you can gift someone is a smile. It costs nothing and it just may turn someone's day around. Reiki holds the same principles- it is gathering up and channeling all of the positive energy that the Universe has to offer and sending it out to everyone. I hope everyone is healthy and happy and I send you all my best.