The World's Weight

I am disheartened today. The weight of the world and the tragedies that abound lay across my soul, an unbearable burden that I fear will not be lifted - ever. That is not to say that I am not learning to push these things to the back of my awareness, focusing instead on the moment that I exist in now. But they lurk, waiting for that briefest instant when I'm not paying attention, to sneak back and steal away the peace that I seek.

Todays economy around the world, the result of a few whose greed and avarice knows no bounds apparently. Their riches and lifestyles at the expense of the majority. People losing their homes, their jobs. The suffering women in middle eastern countries. Today I read that a seventy-five year old Saudi woman has been sentenced to 40 lashes because a child that she'd helped raise although he was not her birth son, now a grown man, came with his friend, to bring her bread. Her crime - she sat in her home with a man that she is not related to. Yesterday, Don found a video where a man was talking about plastic bottle caps and the destruction that they cause in the natural world. Those things find their way into the oceans of the world, get caught up in the currents and sea birds mistake them for food and feed them to their chicks. And then the chicks grow and begin to forage on their own and they eat the bottle caps. He showed pictures of the dead chicks and their heads and wings and legs surrounded piles of bottle caps that they had consumed. He showed a picture of one of those rings that hold the bottle caps onto the juice jugs and a baby sea turtle had swum into one and it had stuck on it's little shell and the turtle had continue to grow. Only now the photo showed it only slightly smaller than dinner plate size, and the ring was still around the middle of its shell but the ring had not grown or stretched because after all those things are indestructible. You can imagine how it looked. Next week HBO will air a program called Death on a Factory Farm. I will not watch because I've seen, thanks to the internet, what happens to the animals who spend their short lives on factory farms. I think that is why I try to take very good care of Ambra and Sierra and Max and Diesel, to make up for the hurt of the others somehow. This is why Holly treats her little lovebirds like little feathered children even though Cricket can be a little brightly colored hag.
And Andy (our friend in Surrey), told Don last week, that the gang problem in the Lower Mainland of BC is an exploding problem and people are dying, innocent people who aren't even in the gangs but were in the wrong place at the wrong time, if it is to be believed that being in your own home behind closed doors is the wrong place!

How can we do this to our beautiful world? How can any man or woman believe that it is their right to rape and pillage this world and every living thing in it? Where is the tenderness and the compassion for all life? Where is the sense of responsibility that comes with being the so-called superior creature on this blue planet? Where is that duty to not take more than you need for living, so that others may take care of their families? I know that some feel that there will be a day of reckoning, others believe that history is doomed to an endless repetition, and others look towards a silent darkness. But in the meantime, the world is wrapped in a layer of misery....and we all pay the price in one way or another. Years ago, when Rodney King was beaten by L.A.'s police, the plea, "can't we all just get along", became the catch-phrase of the day. But I think that a more apt saying would be "can't we please all care"? Expand your hearts and minds and envelop the world with empathy and love.
Albert Schweitzer once said "Until he extends the circle of compassion to all living things, man will not himself find peace."