I’m posting this message today, because I’m sickened by the recent turn of events: Israel’s attacks on Iran, Trump’s threats as a response, and the appalling takedown of U.S. Senator Alex Padilla. On top of the needless reality TV horrors in LA. Was it the full moon? Or was it a dictator and his cronies trying out military power to see how a police state might work?
At the very same time I am sickened, I am also full of hope. Hope that perhaps we’re hitting bottom and that the general public will be ready for another way of dealing, another way of being. And hate cannot be the way. Clearly, the energy of hate is creating the opposite of all America has stood for, along with all core religions. Love would be the word that encompasses values like freedom, equality, respect, kindness. We are one. And yet, recent events are clearly a strategy to divine us. As Valarie Kaur puts it so eloquently, “We cannot let them make us hate them.”
So, how do we pull off the trick of standing for our values and for the oppressed, while refusing to hate? One way might be to shift our energy from standing against to standing for.
For people of faith, another way would be to use a wide-angle lens. Looking at our evolution as humans, we have gotten better over time. So if this crisis is also an opportunity, it might just be the opportunity to accelerate our evolution by committing to love and to creating a culture of the heart.
Isn’t it love that makes us grieve for people suffering? Isn’t it love that makes us so angry and sad about what is happening in the country and the world?
So perhaps at this point, our evolution has not happened through gentle winds. Maybe it takes this kind of storm for something miraculous to break through our stubborn hold on power, money and the mind over the heart. It’s fine to be angry, but anger is not the same as hate. And the crack that divides our illusions, breaks our hearts, divides our loyalties, might just be the portal for something holier than we.
I can’t think of anyone who has put this better than my poet daughter, Laura Weaver. Laura left the earth plane in February 2024, but her poetry will live on. Our family is currently putting together her second book of poems, The River of Awe, which we hope to publish this year. If you already have her first book, Luminous, I know you’ll be eager for the second one. And if not, here’s the real message in the bottle that is helping me put this terrible time in perspective.
God is the Crack
Deep in the crack between towering sandstone
the tree of eternity blooms—this wise juniper
with spiraled trunk and serpentine roots.
She is older than memory –and the wings
of her branches drop silver berries into high desert soils—
an act of divine faith to put seeds down here.
Yes, God is the crack—God is the place life emerges—
disruptive and outrageous. Not the ordered heavens
where all hums along in temperature-controlled glory.
But this storm, this rumble that trembles our bones,
this blaze of lightning, this precious rain on our upturned faces,
leaving pools in hollows of lichen-streaked rock.
God is the crack. The way the down of the milkweed
splits the husk, the way the egg shatters into furry body
and untried wings. God is the way the rainbow
of mushrooms explodes out of earth after storm—
this living neural web that transforms the forest.
God is this life that depends on rupture—
thrives in places where edges meet. And yet,
we seek the comfort of the familiar eddies—
as if this would save us from being part of everything—
as if this would save us from the torrent of time
carving us into new shapes we have never been before.
God is the crack. It is the place where the gold lettering
of your soul speaks its truth—where the dandelion
defies the concrete—and the mustard seed turns
an abandoned lot into a parable that would feed the world.
Reflection questions:
1. Can you see God in “the place life emerges—disruptive and outrageous?”
2. Where in nature do you see life as a miracle?
3. What does the mustard seed turning the lot into a parable mean to you?
ÓLaura Weaver, 2024