power(less)

Yesterday started with me crying in a Costco parking lot. The radio was on, and the news was terrible. Across the ocean, the world is on fire. Families are separated, children are huddled in subway tunnels, cities are in ruins. People are dying. And I am buying two dozen croissants.

I am glued to the coverage in Ukraine, even though I know I shouldn’t be. It’s not good for me and besides, what’s the point? I can’t do anything but send scraps of money, write emails to politicians that receive auto-replies in return. At night I clasp my hands and whisper a tiny plea to the darkness, to nobody: Please make this stop. Please help them.

I feel powerless. And I feel complicit, with all this talk of oil prices and economic repercussions while cities and the lives that bloom within them burn.

I have a good life, while others are bloodied and bruised. And I feel like the very least I can do is witness their suffering. I see it, I see you, I’m sorry. The least I can do, safe here in my home, is have my heart break a little more every day.

We have the capacity for the most beautiful things – love, joy, kindness, compassion – and I am a firm believer in the goodness of people. I have a stubborn faith that the world will always right itself. Hope feels hard to grasp, but I guess I can only keep trying – to cup it in my hands, fragile and wilted, to carry it a little longer.

With love. xx

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