Hi Friends - Having spent the past week in and near Belfast with ten Chicago-area clergy, and a week last month in Pittsburgh with thirty-five *mostly US American people committed to transformative storytelling, and the previous month on the road in seven states from North Carolina to Washington, I am more convinced than ever that the US is *full* of people who are prepared to (creatively, non-violently) put their lives where their ideas are for the sake of the common good.
Every single day I am in community and conversation with people who believe they have a responsibility to share the gifts they hold (whether they believe they deserve them or not), and who act in alignment with that responsibility.
There is no doubt that the US is going through turbulent and deeply uncertain, profoundly uncomfortable times. Risk, loss, fear, and danger dominate many of the stories being told most loudly. I'm not going to sugarcoat things by pretending the uncertainty isn't real, or that it matters less than it does.
But I am going to say what I see: that there are astonishing hearts at work, all over the place.
One of the unintended consequences of compassion is that compassionate people are often exhausted by the way we feel the pain of the world; it can lead us to misread the situations in which we find ourselves - certainly it can lead us to feel disempowered or hopeless, and to devalue the contribution we can make.
So to my friends in the US: so many of you are doing far more to make a better world than you think you are; so many of you are carrying heavier burdens than you allow yourselves to acknowledge; and you are loved and hoped-for by people all around the world.
No quick or easy answers here, but this for now, offered with profound gratitude and deep admiration: thank you to my friends throughout the US for the love and the affirmation and the vision for how we can live as members of an interdependent ecosystem of people, places, and planet, bringing what we have, and asking for what we need.
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And The Porch can help - by nurturing stories of courage, creativity, and community; and by helping us form the kind of communities that initiate, nourish, and send out storytellers who know something about how to live in this moment without denying the challenges, nor overstating the drama, but instead embody a more full way of being today, no matter what brought us here, or what might happen tomorrow.
If you haven't read it in a while, or at all, take a look at the essays we host at www.theporchmagazine.com. They're a step in the direction of the kind of individual and community we might all wish to be.
