It is a challenging time for many of us since the election. For me, it has been one of the most challenging times of my life, a difficult time for loving the world.

And I am one of the lucky ones. I am white, educated, live in a beautiful city and state (Minneapolis, MN), am retired, with a comfortable and beautiful place to live, plenty to eat, family nearby, and creative work that I love.

It saddened me greatly to see my 7 and 9-year old grandchildren worried about whether they would be safe after Donald Trump was elected. I can only imagine how immigrants, people of color, LGBT, Muslim, and Jewish friends, are feeling. In fact I’ve heard from many of these friends that they are afraid or have received threatening or denigrating comments.

Since the election results were announced last week and the ensuing negativity has surfaced in many places around our country I have felt grief, anger, and fear enter my thoughts far too often.My first response to the election results was deep shame to be an American. Then came anger. Then fear for the future.

When I experience things like this which make me feel uncomfortable, sad, afraid, shameful, and angry I tend to leap into action to push away the deep fear, shame, and anger. My instinct the day after the election was the same. I felt I needed to do something immediately to fight what was happening.

Fortunately instead of jumping into action fueled by fear, shame, and anger, I slowed down spending time in meditation and working to accept and allow the deep grief to emerge without pushing it away.

I am still working through waves of grief, anger, and fear. And I’m still (more or less successfully) restraining myself from taking actions that stem from those feelings.

I realized that the grief I am feeling is a grief in seeing with clear eyes an ugliness and hate which has always been present in our country, a political and economic system that does not work for many people, climate change that is happening now and still being denied or ignored by many, and corporate and personal greed that knows no bounds.

This ugliness exists. But so does love, peace, and beauty. I believe that if we are to heal and create positive change, that our actions must spring from love, compassion, acceptance, and peace.

My inspiration in these times is my meditation practice, the example of the Dalai Lama who maintains a loving, cheerful, and caring presence despite all that he and his country have experienced, and the positive effects of restorative justice efforts in other parts of the world.

Our first task in these challenging days is to allow ourselves to feel our fear, grief and anger and move beyond it to love, to allow ourselves to contain and nurture both the spiritual life and the life in this world.

We need to feel our feelings without pushing them away.

We need to stand in a space of love.

We need to learn to love everyone, especially those who think differently from ourselves.

We need to discern right action.

We need to take right action.

We need to love the world.

Reactive responses which are rooted in fear, anger, or hate will not create healing or peace.

Finding love in our hearts, beauty in the natural world, and connections with one another, will help us contribute to the healing process, telling a new story, and living into a new story.

What would LOVE do?

I found a poem this morning by one of my favorite poets and thought, “Yes. My work is loving the world, finding the sweetness, feeling gratitude, acting from a loving heart in all that I do.”

My Work is Loving the World

My work is loving the world

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – 
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

    — Mary Oliver

May you walk in beauty and love. May you find comfort, peace, and joy. May you lift up a light in the world.

Photos taken 2 nights before the super moon full moon in Minneapolis.