So the very personal and very spiritual and almost daily challenge I often face – I would guess many of you often face – is this: how do we find our true personality, our own sense of hope and well-being in a world which takes all of the angry, disturbing and violent images of the world and baptizes us continuously in this new kind of Hell; which dips our heads into the awful brew of misery and hatred.

Which calls it technology, and which tricks us into paying for it?

How do you absorb all of the images and hatred swirling around our heads, in the very air we breathe, on the screens that surround us and increasingly define our lives and worldview? It’s a personal decision, everyone has to make their own choice,  there is no magical way out of the darkness.

The truth is that we live in a world that has often known anger and violence and hatred, often much worse than what we see now, but our faces were not rubbed in it every day and every night without mercy or release. We live in a world where awful news and hateful argument are sold like cereal or plungers for the bathroom. There are no filters, little truth or clarity, little compassion or empathy,  no delays, no escape for our conscious and unconscious selves. We feel we have to react to the bad stuff, the awful news, the angry statements and accusations.

This is our mirror, it is so easy and so tempting to respond with what we see and feel: anger, fear, frustration, even hatred and rage. Rage spawns nothing but rage, hatred it the first cousin of fear and ignorance.

I can only speak for myself.  I resolve not to do it, I won’t fill my head with it, the awful story will never be the whole story for me. I honor and respect the pain and sorrow, I will move on. It will not define me, turn me to hatred,  or determine how I feel about the world around me.

Easier said than done, I am sure. I know. But this is the question, really. Do I become what I hate, what I dislike so much? Or do I stay within my true personality, the one I seek but can not always attain.

I felt this morning that I was awash in the dark side of human life, that is was time to return to the light. I got moving. Maria and I got up early, we took the dogs and went into the new forest we have discovered and been given permission to use, it is filled with deep and dark and beautiful woods and paths for us to follow. They lead to beautiful mountains and hills, green valleys, achingly beautiful sunrise.

Is this still my country, I wondered? Where we fear the poor and the frightened and the hungry, and turn them away, and slam the door in the faces of children? The country that took in my grandmother, terrified and destitute and alone, and have her a safe and free life? And gave me a life?

Not anger, not hatred for me, more like sorrow.

In the woods, I set out to reaffirm my true personality, to cleanse myself of the hateful and violent detritus of humanity, in other places, here at home. I  remember that is only one part of us, and not a part of all of us. we got to the path just as the run rose up and transformed the forest and lit up the dying leaves. I believed that we all can become windows and avenues and paths through which the very idea of God – we each have our own –  carries us on a tide of infinite mercy.

The spirit of love came to me in the woods, opened my heart. If I cannot yet live in a world of love and happiness, then I will carry this idea inside of me.  It can live there. Here, in this spirit, in these woods, I felt that I can at last become real, I can reset the broken bone inside of me, and outside in the world, beyond me.

Hatred recoils from the sacrifice and sorrow of the spiritual world, at the price for resetting one’s bones. It refuses the pain of rebirth and self-awareness. It is drawn to the agony of the hateful and the angry, whose presence causes us so much anguish and reminds us constantly of our disconnection from one another. Hatred is its own faith, it seeks to unify the world in its own way, it can only find peace by seeking to eliminate everything but itself.

And I make no mistake about it, the haters to me are the broken and tortured souls, the ones who need just as much compassion as their victims. The weak and callous politicians, the people who send their children off to die.

I owe every other human sympathy and compassion and understanding when they are harmed and in danger. I owe myself my true self, my true personality, and I choose not to let it be swept away by the idea that the world that appears to be  filled with nothing but violence, hatred and argument. But is so much more.

I remind myself every day that of the seven billion people who live in our world, all but a microscopic handful are simply trying to live their lives as best they can, feed their children, do their work.

They are, to me, heroes in their own way.

They will never prompt a notification on Facebook, or make the evening news. Not unless they kill someone.

So up in the woods, rebirth and reclamation. My true personality lives, and moves on.

That is my true personality, and I found it once more in the sunrise that bathed the deep woods in holy light. Everything that is, is holy, in its own way.