Ukraine
Like most of you I’ve been gutted by reading the news this last week. Our world has been feeling weird for a couple years now, but these last few weeks have been intense. It really hit home for me when I read a news article about the refugees from Ukraine and the article had a picture of a crying little girl, probably around 3 years old being comforted by an aide/border worker. She was wearing a pink fleece jacket with a hood that had little bear ears on it. My kids all had fleece outfits like that too, and that image sent me through a progression of intense emotions: Shock and numbness, followed by intense primitive rage (I wanted to find a bad guy and inflict harm), followed by deep sadness and then some measure of anxiety and hypothesizing about where the fraught geopolitics will take us next.
If you find yourself vacillating between some of these emotions too, I want you to know that you’re not alone and what you’re feeling is not unusual. Out of the cascade of feelings that I experienced, the most worthwhile spot for me to rest was with my sadness. When I allowed the grief to flow for a bit I experienced a settling of my thoughts and feelings. Peace in our world historically has been a fleeting but precious phenomenon and we are right to grieve when the veneer of our civilization is peeled back to show the raw broken human drives at work beneath. Father Richard Rohr likes to say in his books and talks that if we don’t transform our pain, we are going to transmit it. I can’t quite explain it fully, but grief has a way of taking us into the wisest and strongest part of our soul. When we enter that temple we are strengthened by our Maker for whatever may come next.
I spent some time processing my experience in poetry as I went about my homestead chores this week. This is what came out:
Ukraine
My barn, in the light of my headlamp
Floors covered in bedding hosts the new life of the year
Four baby goats lie peacefully in a tangled heap of limbs
Resting after a day of romping in the yard
The rhythmic ringing of milk against the pail
Contented chewing noises from normally restless does
Nature’s alchemy turning hay and oats into milk
Outside an owl hoots, breaking the stillness of the night
And yet adding to a hushful peace
They are back, heralding spring and renewing their boundaries
Finding their mates for the year
Far away, nations groan in pain and rage
War disrupts lives and destroys homes
Will violence descend here? Or there?
Will even this peace be shattered in time?
All that will shake will be shaken
Yet the deep wells of life carry forth
The deep rivers of peace etch their currents
As wisdom pleads we remember their source
