Real Help

Imaginary Playlist:

"Blue"--Joni Mitchell

"Blue Lips"--Regina Spektor

"You May Be Right"--Billy Joel

This weekend, like many of you, I spent time reflecting on Japan, reading news accounts, viewing photos and videos, hearing radio interviews, and reading some personal, eyewitness accounts. I alternated this with daily, familial joys and the usual duties and chores, feeling intensely my human responsibility to live on and live joyfully, somehow a way to honor those lost in the midst of their own joyful lives.

Plus church, which provided more reflective time, on the topic of mercy.  "Blessed are the merciful..."

You know how you often find mean, annoying anonymous comments after online news stories? Here and there, of course, someone angrily says something along the lines of "No prayers, please! Real help is needed." (Or money. Always a good stand-in for real help. To erase the hint of sarcasm there, money does pay for real help and supplies.)

I have to confess, I don't pray. Not in one traditional sense, of asking a personal God for help. I do ask for help--from actual people, and in a huge open-ended plaintive way. So, if God is a person, ze* can hear. But God is not a person for me; it is the name we give to What Is. This idea of what God is honors all religions (and atheism and agnosticism) and does not put them in conflict, but only in my little mind. Clearly, in the world, they are still in conflict. (But I may be right. Or I may be crazy.)

I must also confess that I send good vibrations out into the universe whenever anyone asks. Recently, I sent healing energies to my sister and her family in Ohio. I paused in the middle of the day, upon reading emails from my sister-in-law in Santa Cruz, to send vibrating sighs of relief and hope to the people connected to her company in Japan, rippling out to everyone. This may not be "real help," but I continue to do it.

I hope to find ways of really helping the world in this situation and others. I think there are dark shared times yet to come, related to the pollution and fallout from this particular disaster and to our continued habits on the earth. But right now Japan needs real help, urgent and particular, and I see our world coming together to give it, in whatever ways we can.

*gender-neutral pronoun

Birds again, from Pamela Callahan.