What a Year

What a year, no?

Whew…And yet, there is so much worthy of our love, and of our devotion to create a kinder world. Keep renewing your vows to care for yourself so you can keep rising up to care for one another, for this living breathing planet, and for the innocent animals that, by their sheer presence, make this world a sort of heaven on Earth.

“When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.” 

(Wendell Berry)