Good morning…
“Finding peace,” she wrote me the day after the election, having just returned home from a trip to Portugal. “It certainly is a practice right now for me of ‘breaking up’ with the addictive consumption of news. I am also using all of the strategies I learned in Alanon about how to be at peace ‘even though they are drinking’. Whether or not they are ‘drinking’ or whoever is President, peace is an inside game. But whoa. This is a hum-dinger of a thing. So we wiggle our toes, return to this moment, practice gratitude (my fluffy pillows have never felt so luxurious because our last airbnb was mildewy!) and get outside. The last thing I heard when I went to bed Tuesday night in Portugal and the first thing I heard the next morning before I checked my phone and felt the catastrophic feelings was the repetitive, cradling sound of the ocean crashing outside of my window. Ah. This is what is real. This is what anchors us. Like the respiration cycle of Mother Earth. So I am leaning into the trust I feel in God’s beautiful Nature and just taking it one day at a time – loving detachment from the ‘what if’ and ‘if only’.”
“I have also ‘broken up’ with my addictive consumption of news,” I responded. “I recognize that our great spiritual migration toward the all-inclusive, never ending, gracious love of God – the divine dynamic we have been studying in our Sunday group – is a constant movement inside of us, a movement not recorded on the news. You’re right. Peace does begin as an inside game, before it naturally expands out to transform the world. This is what is real. This is what anchors us. ‘Breaking up’ with my addictive consumption of news – this repeated, committed choice – is gently coaxing me to ‘break up’ with other addictions too.”
Freedom. Breathing room. What St. Ignatius calls, “holy indifference”. In creative ways, I have witnessed the Spirit of God quietly leading us forward.
We wiggle our toes.
We return to this moment.
We practice gratitude.
We get outside.
“Breaking up” with our addictions, small choice by small choice, might Psalm 43:3 (CJB) lead our ongoing conversation with God?
Send out your light and your truth; let them be my guide; let them lead me to your holy mountain, to the places where you live.
…Sue…
