Poem 61 (Pandemic Day 65)

From: A Grateful Heart: 

Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles

Empower me

              to be a bold participant,

              rather than a timid saint in waiting,

              in the difficult ordinariness of now;

              to exercise the authority of honesty,

              rather than to defer to power,

              or deceive to get it;

              to influence someone for justice,

              rather than impress anyone for gain;

              and, by grace, to find treasures

              of joy, or friendship, of peace

              hidden in the fields of the daily

              you give me to plow.

---Ted Loder

 A Grateful Heart: Daily Blessings for the Evening Meal from Buddha to the Beatles, Edited by M. J. Ryan, Conari Press, 1994.

For the last few years I have often woken up in the morning feeling troubled; an uneasy, uncertain feeling that gravity was disappearing, that pieces of the world that I thought were stable and sound were falling off into space... 

Throughout my life I have always leaned towards tolerance and acceptance of others; their personalities and actions were fascinating or enlightening or just merely different than my own, not alarming or threatening.  Quirks were fine with me; I have them, I liked and appreciated them in others.  But things had been changing in society for a while, it had still possible to ignore or overlook or step around those changes for years, but the last presidential election completely lifted the veil--some of the changes were ugly and unsettling, even dystopian. 

 1984 by George Orwell was meant to be an unnerving fiction, not a potential reality; the "Ministry of Truth" not meant to be an actual government functionary--but here we had "alternative facts" and "fake news" and vulgar tweets and uncouth insults and self-dealing, hyper-partisanship and nepotism and all the deadly sins of governance...and a substantial portion of the American public saying, "That's all OK with me."  And some of those people were people I loved and cared about.  How do we dance around these clashes of values and perspectives and definitions of truth and reality?  

Ted Loder's words are a blessing I have sought and a grace that I hope for; a restoration of gravity and peace at sunrise and sunset--I share that blessing with you.