I can’t quite remember a day that did not begin with awful suffering and endless conflict and anger. Sometimes I think I have fallen into a bad dream, and  I wait patiently to wake up. But in the past days and weeks, the nightmares seem to be lined up like airplanes at an overwhelmed airport.

I no sooner comprehend the many thousands of people left damaged or homeless or bereaved in awful storms, when there is ugly talk of war, and raging political fires, and more storms, and more tearing at our national quilt, and then scores of people murdered and hundreds injured for no reason even our finest investigators seem able to determine.

We are even fighting over what to call this sorry and murderous man – he can’t be a terrorist, that isn’t convenient right now, terrorists have to be a different color and live in a different place. So he must be us, and that is the most disturbing thing of all.

Empathy is overwhelmed, compassion seems helpless, there is too much suffering to comprehend, too much argument to absorb. I have no magic want to heal the pain and loss of others, I have no power to erase suffering from the world. I can only stay grounded, and try to help one person at a time.

Small acts of great kindness.

I feel I am at the mercy of the Queen of Hearts, that I wake up in Wonderland every morning. ‘Where in the world am I?,” asks the White Rabbit, “that’s the great puzzle.”

Says the cat, “Oh, you can’t help that, we’re all mad here.”

The Queen of Hearts is ruling the kingdom. “Why,” she says, “sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

So how do I get myself grounded and stay grounded, and how do you? I can’t tell you what to do, only myself. We can only do it for ourselves.

I’ve always believed that once I get myself grounded, and was, in my life, almost never grounded, that I can handle the fiercest storms, and every day, there is another fierce storm lined up and waiting to land. Can I handle them all?

I believe the answer for me, the way to be grounded, comes with my idea of home and where it is.

For years, I looked everywhere outside of myself for home, but it was when I stopped looking for  home outside of myself and began building the structure and foundations of home inside of myself that I discovered there are no stronger more powerful or intimate connections than those that exist between a soul and a body that are determined to be whole.

And I am determined to be whole, I am small and helpless except when it comes to me. In the Kabbalah, God says love is the point.

“And when I fall in love,” wrote V.C. Andrews in Flowers In The Attic, “I will build a mountain to touch the sky. Then, my lover and I will have the best of both words, reality firmly under our feet, while we have our heads in the clouds with all our illusions still intact. And the purple grass will grow all around, high enough to reach our eyes.”

In the face of all this, I am grounded in the embrace of empathy and compassion and the love that surrounds me.

I am mindful of the suffering, but I can’t stop the suffering in the world. I do not suffer for them or with them, I can only make a joyful noise.

And I will build a mountain to touch the sky.