“Located on the Main Post of the Presidio National Park in San Francisco, the Courage Museum will put public land to use for a public service: ending the public health crisis caused by violence, and the hate that fuels it. The Courage Museum is a design lab for the deep, transformative human change needed to prevent violence before it happens.”

This is the mission of the Courage Museum, created by Futures Without Violence, a nonprofit organization with more than 30 years of groundbreaking programs, policies, and campaigns that empower individuals and organizations working to end violence against women and children around the world.

My four-year-old grandson Stevie started horseback riding lessons 2 years ago—a therapeutic experience that has taught him balance, emotional intelligence and given him a greater love for animals. His mother was raised with her aunt and uncle’s two horses, and the joy of riding continues. The farm owner is dedicated to the rescue and proper care of horses, dogs, and farm animals—values that resonate with our family.  Recently, Stevie started grooming Daisy, the pony he rides, pulling the brush down her side with one hand while patting her gently with his other hand. He is so very in tune with the horse and laughs in glee when Daisy nuzzles him. I watched a video of Stevie riding, his back straight, brown curls sticking out from under his helmet, his gaze concentrated between the horse’s ears. His hands held the reins, and he told Daisy, “Go,” and guided her around the corral, coaching her back to the barn when his lesson ended. Such a little boy doing a big boy job.

The wind rustles the leaves outside my window as I contemplate my heart, the universe, the way forward in joy despite suffering. I have always welcomed change, believed that life is an evolution of experiences, each one leading to a better way, even if challenging times accompany them. But I cannot think of the children’s lives that were swept away in violence in Uvalde Texas on May 24th as a change that will bring anything bright or better. I have never accepted America’s fascination with guns as being a “right.” Nineteen children and two adults gone from this earthly plane because a person barely18 years old bought an AR 15 automatic rifle and went to an elementary school. Ten precious victims in Buffalo gunned down in a racist attack a week earlier. Four in Tulsa a few days later. It is tragic. It is preventable.

Christmas night was peaceful. The family had departed and I inhaled and exhaled deep breaths…eyes closed, gratitude as another year passes and my family is healthy. I remembered what is true and important – love and compassion, truth, and light. This has been a year of listening to myself. I slipped away from the world of social media which has become too much work, too much of a diversion, too much of a poke rather than a hug. Friends and family are in each breath I take, each card or email I write, each phone call I make - the thrill of hearing my daughters’ and son’s voices, rich, clear tones of our ancestors singing in my ear bring the entire universe into view.

I am committed to love others, most pointedly the marginalized, the overlooked, those who have suffered in the hierarchical systems of oppression and neglect in our world. But recently, I have begun to wonder how I can love those who are the perpetrators of this oppression and who I regretfully consider to be my opponents.

Protest and activism stir up powerful feelings of righteousness—my way is just and equitable; the ways of the patriarchy, white supremacy and the privileged are not. But I do not want to bask in feelings of righteousness. I wish to bring healing into our world, and into my life. The divisions between people begin with want –wanting more for oneself; not wanting to share the riches, land, waterways, or accept other cultures’ ways of being. We have witnessed the disparities in health care, access to healthy food, education, and jobs. This has been one way the dominant culture has maintained economic sovereignty. In We Are Each Other’s Harvest by Natalie Baszile, documentation of lands stolen from Indigenous, Black and Latinx people shows how white America prevented people of color from inheriting property and building family wealth over generations.

There is always enough for everyone.

Visiting cathedrals around the world, including the High Gothic Cologne Cathedral in Germany, its bays and naves with deeply hued stained-glass windows and arcade piers and spires, its statuary and candles; the Vatican, its riches and art; the Metropolitan Cathedral in Mexico City, the Great Buddha of Kamakura – an outdoor cathedral of peace, I marveled the grandeur of artisanship and the length of time it took to complete each one. 632 years for the Cologne Cathedral, 21 years for India’s Taj Mahal; 400 years for Chichen Itza in Yucatan, Mexico; 400 years for the Angor Wat temple in Cambodia, and Stonehenge in England over 1,600 years. What was the promise of fulfillment for each artisan? Was the mindfulness and service required to create the work enough to sustain their daily toil?

We come upon many experiences in life unexpectedly - some welcomed, some unwanted. The glory is how we handle these surprises. My morning was a compendium of the delightful and the fearful.

A little after 6 AM, I saw three red-tailed hawks gliding above the hill, tipping their wings and making a trilling whistle as they circled prey, their beautiful movements below wisps of pink tinged cirrus clouds. Hawks remind me to look at the big picture, to keep my focus above the minutia of life, knowing there is always a higher purpose.

I am an HSP – highly sensitive person. Those of us who fit this diagnosis are more aware of subtleties than others, can become overstimulated when things are chaotic, have increased emotional sensitivity, stronger reactivity to both external and internal stimuli—pain, hunger, light, and noise—and have a complex inner life.

I am not one to look over my shoulder and view past experiences with regret. When circumstances change in my life, or people I love change their closeness to me, I allow myself to feel sadness and then embrace letting go, and offer gratitude for what was. Every experience in my life brings something good: I open my heart a bit wider, I learn something new about the world and human nature, I find the boundaries of what I will accept and what I do not want in my energetic field. I grow.

The path of transformation is ongoing. Who I was in my twenties expanded when I entered my thirties, and I like to remember each decade thereafter as having a theme of change and transformation of my knowledge, spiritual understanding and ability to love “greater.”

In my memoir Space Between the Stars: My Journey to an Open Heart, I wrote: “When I look back at my life and compare it to what I had imagined it would be, it has been a strenuous journey along a mountainous path with breathtaking views. I was taught to look toward heaven to find God, but I searched my own heart and found light, joy, and God’s breath of truth inside me. I believe in the connectedness of us all…”

This morning I was awakened by a heavy thud on my roof. Not at all like the rumbling of the 4.5 magnitude earthquake two mornings ago, I almost didn’t open my eyes. But I decided it was time to get up and looked out my window to see a great horned owl sitting on the roof across from my bedroom deck. I sat up, not grabbing my phone to take a photo, but taking in the bird with my mind. The piercing eyes almost made me look away – such power and attitude, determination and one-pointed focus. The feathers were fluffy and variegated brown and gray, with a white neck. She swiveled her head to the side, behind her, and down, staring at my garden. I thought of the cute bunnies I saw last week and wondered if they were her prey.

I have been listening to and invoking sage wisdom to inspire my days. Mythologist Michael Meade, in his Living Myth Podcast, speaks of the Community of the Heart, in which we respect the rights of all others. He also refers to ancient African cultures in which whiteness represents the ancestors and if you want to commune with them, you hang a piece of white cloth. Ancestors are revered as the “living dead” because once someone leaves the body, the earthly plane, all the distractions, misperceptions, and desires leave also, and we become wise.

These are exhilarating times. I began in the paralyzing fear of Covid 19 and sheltering in place, to learning how to work without physical interaction with others, to accepting that, since I live alone, I would not have “touch,” to willing myself not to turn away from the 8 minutes and 46 seconds of George Floyd’s murder, to realizing I must find a higher reason for these experiences.

There is time, now, for silence. Those of us who are ordered to “stay at home” or “shelter in place” have found solitude even while scrambling to become our children’s good teachers, using the dining table as our office, with fear, anxiety, boredom, and anger rising when we listen to conflicting messages on the news. I have experienced incredulous moments of pause when I look around and wonder what world I am in.

“If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”

― Toni Morrison

This quote, along with Marian Wright Edelman’s, “Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time,” is the foundation from which I have lived my life. They were not my intentional motivations, but what I learned from my family as I grew up. I was not taught to succeed in a silo, but to live and breathe in community.

My daughter opened the very full recycling bin in my kitchen today. “You know this really isn’t going to make a difference, right?”

I thought for a few moments – of the corporations that are emptying colossal amounts of toxic chemicals into rivers and streams, of automobiles producing significant amounts of nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and other pollution into our atmosphere, of the Dakota Access Pipeline which has had at least 10 spills totaling hundreds of gallons of crude oil since it began operations in June 2017, and everywhere on earth, the ice is changing. Kilimanjaro’s snows have melted more than 80 percent since 1912. Glaciers in the Garhwal Himalaya in India are retreating so fast that researchers believe that most central and eastern Himalayan glaciers could virtually disappear by 2035. Arctic sea ice has thinned significantly over the past half century, and its extent has declined by about 10 percent in the past 30 years, and the edges of Greenland's ice sheet are shrinking. (Glick 2019)