(the photo is of a “faith” stone of mine that I had embedded in the new concrete poured onto the back porch)

Some days it seems that almost everyone in the country is either sad or grumpy or both. If you’re not making masks or streaming videos, these are not good and happy days. If you watch the news, you cannot be happy.

There are no Winston Churchills in  Washington to tell us the hard truth and call up our better natures and convince us we will prevail. So we either do it ourselves or sink into the Sad and Grumpy morass.

There is some wisdom out there that lifts me up when I need to be lifted up. Mahatma Gandhi wrote that when he despaired, he remembered that all throughout history the way of truth and love has always won.

That is a part of my faith, which is my salvation.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote that every person has secret sorrows which the world knows not, and often times we call a man (or woman) cold when he or she is only sad.

Jonathan Safran Foer wrote in one of his books that you cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

Pablo Neruda wrote what he said was his saddest line: “I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.”

I wonder, as others do, why people have to be this sad and lonely and grumpy. What’s the point? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness and despair?

Is this virus the worst that can happen to us and our lives?

I like the writer Clive Barker’s line: “any fool can be happy. It takes someone with a real heart to make beauty out of the stuff that makes us weep.”

When I am sad or grumpy, I don’t tell other people what to do or to cheer up or move on. That’s like telling a grieving person to get over it.

Some people need to be sad, some people want to be sad. My faith tells me that pain is inevitable, but suffering is a choice. I always have a choice.

I do turn to my faith, which is strong and powerful for me. I turn to my love for Maria, my daughter and granddaughter, my sister, my dogs and donkeys and farm and blog and photos.

I pick up my camera and set out onto the farm or in the woods to make beauty our the stuff that makes me and others weep. I cry sometimes and think of tears as words that need to be spoken.

I think of the years when I was lost and broken, and thank the angels for giving me another chance.

My faith reminds me when I am sad to do some good, it will always make me feel happy.

My faith tells me that I am not here on this earth to be sad or grumpy, although I sometimes am. I am here to write, to love my wife, to take my photos, feed my blog, walk Zinnia in the woods, live my precious life to the fullest every single day.

My life has unlimited potential for happiness, I need not ever stop searching for it, because sadness is always right there, but happiness needs to be found.

I love reading history, and I am often jolted by history into comprehending violence and cruelty and brutality that far surpasses anything that threatens me in this world. That usually stops me feeling grumpy or sad for long.

If I’m sad and grumpy, I can’t live my life, and no politician or Pandemic is going to take my life away from me. So far, the fates have spared me, and I am grateful that they have given me the opportunity to be safe and wise.

If all else fails, I accept my sadness, there is often great beauty and release in it. My favorite writing about the emptiness of sadness came from Safran Foer, in his book Everything Is Illuminated:

“He awoke each morning with the desire to do right, to be a good and meaningful person, to be, as simple as it sounded and as impossible as it actually was, happy. And during the course of each day, his heart would descend from his chest into his stomach. By early afternoon he was overcome by the feeling that nothing was right, or nothing was right for him, and by the desire to be alone. By evening he was fulfilled: alone in the magnitude of his grief, alone in his aimless guilt, alone even in his loneliness. I am not sad, he would repeat to himself over and over, I am not sad. As if he might one day convince himself. Or fool himself. Or convince others–the only thing worse than being sad is for others to know that you are sad. I am not sad. I am not sad. Because his life had unlimited potential for happiness, insofar as it was an empty white room. He would fall asleep with his heart at the foot of his bed, like some domesticated animal that was no part of him at all. And each morning he would wake with it again in the cupboard of his rib cage, having become a little heavier, a little weaker, but still pumping. And by the midafternoon he was again overcome with the desire to be somewhere else, someone else, someone else somewhere else. I am not sad.”