three golden things

This has been a hard week. A few days ago it started raining, and it didn’t stop. It was torrential, relentless. The amount of rain that might fall in an extremely wet month poured down in a single day. An hour or two from where I live, mountainsides crumbled. Highways snapped in half. Bridges were washed away. Farms were submerged. Homes were lost.

It’s devastating for the communities here, and it comes on the heels of a summer where a wildfire raged into a nearby town and burned it down to ashes. Where a heatwave resulted in hundreds of deaths. Where a pandemic simmers on, seemingly endlessly.

On some days, the suffering in the world screams at me. It vibrates. I turn on the news and it makes me cry. I don’t think you can look away from the bad stuff, though, even when it threatens to break your heart. The trick is to stare it straight in the eye and not let it turn you to stone. The trick is to remember that through this tapestry of chaos there are still threads of gold if you really look for them.

It feels wrong sometimes, doesn’t it, to look for evidence of what’s still good when people are being crushed by such hard and heavy things? But it’s necessary, isn’t it? It’s how we carry on, by knowing that even amidst the heartache there is still kindness and joy and tiny miracles.

So here, after a hard week, are three good, golden things to hold onto.

1. So many stories of kindness have come from the floods. One of my favourites was from a woman who was driving her son back to college after a visit and got stuck along the way due to massive mudslides. They ended up at a stranger’s house in a town along the way – the aunt of a former classmate of her sister-in-law – along with a handful of other stuck stragglers. While they waited for the road to clear, they hauled out ladders and cleaned her gutters. They chopped her firewood for the winter. They volunteered at the community’s makeshift emergency station, stopped and shared a beer with a group of long distance truck drivers stranded with their loads. “I just met so many amazing people — both the local people in Hope that were taking care of people … and four lovely new friends that came into the same house as us,” she later said. “People were just pitching in all over.”
2. Someone recently recommended author Yrsa Daley-Ward and I’m so glad I took the time to discover her work. Her words are gorgeous, so soothing. You can find her on Instagram (@yrsadaleyward), subscribe to her email newsletter The Utter or pick up her new book The How. (I’ve done all three!)
3. A 96-year-old man named Giuseppe Paternò has become Italy’s oldest graduate after being awarded first-class honours in philosophy from the University of Palermo in Sicily. “It’s one of the happiest days of my entire life,” he said. “I only wish my wife were here to see me. She died 14 years ago.” And he’s not done yet: “I’m considering carrying on for a master’s degree. My mother lived to be 100. If the numbers and the genetics are on my side, then I still have four years left.” (The message to the rest of us: You’re not too old and it’s not too late.

With love. xx

“There are so many other things you might have been. Not larger, not smaller, no more or no less, only different; and oh, how they scream at you sometimes, how they tell you what you’re missing, how they come for you on those peaceless, red, bewildering nights. Tell them to quiet down, and go on about their business, for none of them is sweeter, more real or alive than the very thing you are beocming. They are no more important than the very things that have happened. They are never more verdant, or sparkling or exceptional. You are too grown-up to forget that most things feel the same, up close.”

Yrsa Daley-Ward

Photo by Nathan Jennings on Unsplash