I am having a very hard time in the world these days. I find myself crying almost every day and literally heart nauseous all the time. Sometimes it is on the back burner, but usually not.

I cry for the children separated from their parents.  For they are crying and lonely and scared. I cry for the parents who are out of their minds, stuck in a system that is torture -- pure torture – and that demeans them in the most fundamental way through the act of taking their children away from them. Parents, just like me and you, wanting to wrap our arms around our kids when they are scared to comfort them.  It is torture to impose this pain and then prevent them from doing what every parent wants to do for their children. These parents came here to protect their children from one hell – and now they’ve run into another.  A hell that America is creating and imposing on them.  But really there is no “them.”  Each moment in my life — as I work, as I lay down to sleep, as I go the grocery store, as I walk my dogs, each moment -- these children and parents are suffering intensely because of America’s current administration.

 I am an American, no longer proud, but rather ashamed of my country.  If our kids were taken away from us for even a short while, we would be freaking out. How can we be okay with this and just go along with our daily routines and normal lives?  How can we not be out on the streets everyday?  Most of our grandparents and great grandparents were immigrants.  We are all the same.  Right now, I think of these children trapped in these cold barracks and tents and I know that insanity has taken over our country. This is not what “the home of the free” looks like.  This is not “making America great again.”  It is one of our bottoms, along with slavery and the Wounded Knee Massacre.

 I watch the EPA being stripped of its functions to protect the environment.  It is rapidly being dismantled and is now being used by the right as a tool for the oil and coal lobby.  It is overturning everything President Obama did to protect our natural resources.  The EPA was started by President Nixon.  It was made to protect our lands and seas and skies and waters for our future generations.  It is being dismantled so rapidly.  I cannot avoid feeling the consequences of this in my body.  And even if people don’t care about the other species who are dying, who are endangered, who are going extinct forever... what about your own children and grandchildren?  I am heart sickened as we strip away all of the protections, literally, that were put in place to try to slow down our demise — the turning point from which there is no return.  But instead, this administration doesn’t care.  Motivated by short term gain and greed, it takes off all the brakes so that humans can freely pollute our waters and air and rape our earth.  It is extremely painful.  To be awake.  To the destruction.  To the Pain.  To the Dying process of so many, many sentient beings. 

 I watch the choices for the Supreme Court Seat and I grieve.  Trump loves making the point that these people will be there for many, many years.  It is like he is pushing a knife into my gut every time he gleefully emphasizes how long these “fresh faces” will be in control on the Supreme Court.  I grieve because it will likely be for the rest of my life.  I grieve because so many important decisions will be made that will hurt human and animal and earth rights.  I am scared for women.  I am scared for the LGBTQ community.  I am scared about Roe v. Wade.  I am sickened that we seem to be speeding back into the dark ages again.

 I am in for the fight.  I am in for whatever actions I can take that are part of the resistance to what is happening and the transmutation of the darkness into the light.  I know that I must keep my spirit drinking of the light or I will drown in the sorrow, rage and horror.  The light is of the Mystery. The light is sourced from deep within and the other dimensions.  I choose... to lift... into the light... so I can shine bright... as my truest greatest might... Yes, my sense of might is Light. I access this light — not from this dimension — but from the deeper and the vaster and the wider.  These days it is a radical paradigm shift to rise from the breaking heart to the realms of light.  But it is the fuel, the food, the substance of soul necessity.

 I know that I have much company.  Human kind.  Many other people are sickened as well.  And angry.  And grieving.  I don’t have the answers, but I know that somehow we must break out of the trance of passivity and bring our outrage, our sorrow, our embodied knowingness, our aliveness to bold, courageous action that is out of the box.  To act as if we actuallyknow that these children locked up by our American government are our own children, that this earth is actually our own true home, and that we are actually brothers and sisters in the family of life -- and that what happens to another happens to ourselves.

Lovefully,
Deva Joy