Laughing at Ourselves If we can laugh at ourselves and take pleasure in life’s absurdity, we tend to feel happier. We may forgive more readily, love more easily, feel more grateful, and have more fun. If we have a good sense of humor, we’ll have an overall feeling of peace because we’re less likely to react with anger at the stresses and disappointments of each day. If we could all laugh a little more, we’d get along better. I’m not talking here about humor that shames others, that is crass, cutting, or sarcastic, that is used to assert power or to bully. I’m talking about compassionate laughter that bonds us,…
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Truth, Stages of Faith, and Our Political Divide
Living in a Parallel Universe What a week this has been. First, Raphael Warnock became the first black, and John Ossoff the first Jewish, men from Georgia to be elected to the United States Senate. Then, a mob, egged on by our president, broke into the Capitol building, thinking they had the power to stop the certification of the electoral college vote because Trump incorrectly implied that they did. Normally a routine ceremony, the certification was turned into a tedious farce by a few elected officials who chose to challenge the vote. They defended their actions by parroting the baseless claims of election fraud Trump has spouted for months, in…
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Poetry, Gardening, and “the Pulsing in the Universe”
The Pulsing in the Universe The poet Stanley Kunitz said that if one listens in the night, beneath the rumble of traffic and wind and animals, one can hear the “pulsing in the universe.” [1] What is this pulsing? Is it something more true than what we perceive during the bustle of our day? What can it tell us? How do we learn to hear it? Why should we bother? Along with being a poet, Kunitz was a gardener. For nearly all of his one hundred years on Earth, he touched and tended and shaped and loved the soil and the plants that grew there. Along with tending gardens, he…
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Faith and Insecurity
Faith in Love What do you have faith in? When I ask myself that question, the first thing that comes to mind is that I have faith in life itself. I have faith in our resilience as a species, and in the resilience of the earth to revive, no matter what we do to her. That doesn’t make acceptable the abuse of one another and destruction of our habitat, but I do believe in the power of life to revive itself again. Next, I think of love. My faith in love is unwavering. Even though hate seems rampant right now, and even though at times in my life I tried…
