And we’ve lived thru , and most of us have survived, the first eon of 2026.
This morning I slept in until all of 7:30am. God I love weekends. I can be the last one to drag out bed on the weekends… And most of the time I am.
Once I finished my morning routine, I sat down with my coffee mug and my laptop and started a job I’ve been putting off… organizing my downloaded files into some kind of a folder system. If I discovered anything during the past month, it’s how quicky file can multiply when you start playing with AI image processing. Add in the image production during article processing for my Appalachian Mountain Dreams site and it becomes something you really shouldn’t put off.
So after an hour of setting up folders and moving files around, I figured I’d better start breakfast before my better half started getting peckish (you know what I hate — typing a word with the correct spelling only to have spellcheck underline it in red so now I have to check and make sure my tired old brain is still on the right track)… Breakfast was good, just bacon and eggs with toast, but it filled that empty spot.
I spent some time yesterday on the phone. It’s not something I’ve done a lot over the past few years. After years in a position at work where it seems that was all I did some weeks, I’ve gotten out of the habit. Though, my sister has been trying to instill the habit in me ever since our Mom passed. Funny how we all were tied together thru that hub and once the hub was gone it’s had to be replaced…
Long ago, just before I began this long ramble I had started through my email. And after quickly reading just the headlines on most of the… I can’t call them political because we don’t have politics anymore, I ran across one from Krista Tippet… And forgive me Krista, I had to share a rather long quote:
The long cumulative conversation that is On Being has taught me to see the world, and tell the story of our time, in this way: through an eye on what is unfolding in human psyches and bodies and spirits.
This way of seeing naturally surfaces truths that are not partisan, or don’t want to be. We are profoundly distressed, intimately and globally, at a nervous-system level — and this distress crosses every identity and dividing line. Opinion polls have their uses, I suppose. But they don’t unearth that, beneath whatever simplistic answer I give to a simplistic question, my heart is sore. Your heart is sore. We do not want to live in a world of rage and cruelty, one human being to another. We do not want to live in a world in which we scroll through videos of real people humiliated and dying at the hands of other real people, with these videos at our children’s fingertips too.
We can disagree on questions of rights and laws, and those questions have their place. But I’ll say it plain: whether a human being is a citizen or an immigrant, a neighbor or a stranger, does not have any bearing whatsoever on the moral and spiritual question of whether they are being treated with cruelty or humanity.
There is nothing abstract or mysterious about this notion of humanity I’m invoking. It is carried in the phrase of Abraham Lincoln that has rippled through history, because it names something fundamentally real and true: “the better angels of our nature.” I believe that the same images and meanings surface naturally, in almost all of us, when we hear those words. I also know — with my eye on the human drama underlying everything we call “political” — that it becomes more and more difficult to believe in these meanings and be true to them when a body, or a body politic, is living in fear. My lens on the human condition will not let me forget that human beings on the giving end of unfolding scenes of cruelty are themselves in a dehumanized condition. They too are distressed inside, living in fear. This is not an excuse for anything, but it is a piece of the reality before us that we must also take seriously.
At the very same time, this is one of those moments when the strange and beautiful reality of the human condition rises in the face of what would deny it. In Minnesota, where I raised my children and grew this On Being Project, a world of care and dignity one human being towards another has flourished within and around all the images coming to us of violence and protest and despair. There are churches converted to food banks. There are families accompanying other families and neighbors delivering meals and other essentials to individuals who feel vulnerable for multitudes of reasons. There are strangers bearing witness, non-violently, as homes are approached and doors beaten down. There are teachers and librarians and healers stepping up to care for children and teenagers who are traumatized by all of this. I am hearing a thousand stories that are not making the “news” as I’m trying to follow it, but they too are the story of our time, and they are stories of what makes us human and humane.
I repeat: I cannot believe that this beautiful strangeness and complexity reside on one side of our political lines and not the other. A few years ago, I penned a few lines in this newsletter that have become my credo:
Enough of us see that we have a world to remake.
We want to meet what is hard and hurting.
We want to rise to what is beautiful and life-giving.
We want to do that where we live, and we want to do it walking alongside others.
We’re asking, where to begin?
We have a long way to go to find our way back to feeling our belonging to each other that has never stopped being true. But it is what we are called to. I cleave to my faith that there are “enough of us” longing to meet this calling.
The common ground of our sore hearts may be the place to begin, and return, and ever begin again.
With love,
Krista
I’ve been listening to Krista for probably thirty years. She was as close as I ever found to help me with the conversation I was having with myself about spirituality. And when I started reading her email I just knew I had to share it my vast audience (lounge in cheek). So, I think my job this morning is done… I’ve shared the inspiration I felt, I’ve put out there into the ether.
