I recently heard the U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón read her “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” * The poem will be engraved on the robotic space craft, Europa Clipper, scheduled to launch this month from Cape Canaveral, FL and to arrive to Europa in 2030!
The poet says it’s not only written for NASA’s mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, but for us, here on earth as well. **
The whole poem speaks to me….. of a deep love for our home. Planet Earth. And a particular line speaks to me about this moment of human history where our country and our world feel so divided. And yet we see the deep goodness of human nature shining through the cracks, breaking through the false divisions, when we need it most.
“And it is not darkness that unites us,
Not the cold distance of space, but
The offering of water, each drop of rain,
Each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.”
Right now, people in my community are organizing fundraisers and collecting donations for the communities in Western North Carolina devastated by Hurricane Helena, hundreds of miles away. I have friends there in Boone and Ashville who are in awe, witnessing the way their communities have come together to help each other.
One of my friends there told me about a disaster-displaced family camped out in a Lowes parking lot offering her and her kids hotdogs last week! We know how to love our neighbors! It’s our instinct! Especially when we’re face to face, our full humanity on display. In that moment, our programing, our identities and ideologies don’t have a chance to hijack our brains and muddy the waters of our clear-sighted deep-down kindness.
Let’s remember where the phrase “love your neighbor” originates, and what it really means. In the book of Luke in the Bible, Jesus teaches the law “love your neighbor as yourself” then to answer the question “who is my neighbor?” tells the parable of the “Good Samaritan” and asks his audience who the neighbor in the story is. The neighbor, known as the “Good Samaritan” is the person who went out of his way to help someone of a different nation, race and religion who was in need. Jesus then says, “Go and do likewise.” ***
There’s an amazing Throughline podcast that takes a look what happens, contrary to our fears, when our defenses are stripped away by dire circumstances. Here’s part of that conversation:
“A: …..disasters like Hurricane Katrina are a window into what really happens when the thin veneer goes away. It's a window into what is possible when humanity is put to the test.
R: We're going to always be hit with disasters, but a disaster don't mean that it have to destroy hope. Without hope, this world will never be a better place.
S: What was amazing for me is over and over and over again, this extraordinary joy shone out of people's faces, came out of their accounts because they'd found something that's missing in the disaster of everyday life. When everyday life is alienating, is meaningless, is commodified, is fragmented, they'd found a deep sense of immediacy, of social connection, of purposefulness. That's something I think we crave all the time.
B: We've got hundreds and hundreds of studies done by sociologists and anthropologists since the 1960s, and time and time again, they've shown that actually, what you get in a crisis situation is an explosion of altruism. So people start helping each other on a massive scale.
S: It's not all about the war of each against each, about the selfish gene and the struggle for survival. In so many ways, at so many levels throughout evolution, throughout life on earth, you see collaboration, cooperation, often even between species as well as within species. And we know that's what it takes to survive.” ****
I encourage you to listen to the full, surprising and illuminating podcast!
There’s another story, part of a special series called “Stress Less," released today, that offers strategies on how to reduce stress created by polarization.
We can choose the stories and voices we listen to….not just passively consume the ones social media algorithms spoon feed us. We can choose to listen to stories that challenge our fears and beliefs, instead of remaining in our own echo-chambers. We can choose the doom and gloom version of reality that feeds our fears and drives us apart, or we can choose to hear stories of hope and unity.
We can choose to believe in the goodness of humanity. Let’s choose to believe that “We too are made of wonders!”
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgWbeDNPD6o Hear the poet read her poem
**https://www.npr.org/transcripts/nx-s1-5046708 Hear an interview with the poet
***https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2010%3A25-37&version=NIV “Good Samaritan”
****https://www.npr.org/transcripts/1151023362 Listen to "When Things Fall Apart" podcast
*****https://www.npr.org/series/g-s1-24355/stress-less Listen to “Stress Less” to reduce stress of political polarization
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