(Photo: The Last Dahlia)

In our world, everything is couched in terms of problems; we are barraged with worries, complaints, fears, and “problems” almost every minute of our lives, from the moment we wake up until the second we fall asleep, those who can.

Day by day, the world we are offered seems bleaker and angrier, and no wonder we don’t have a lot of better choices.

We’ve somehow created a society that needs us to be angry or fearful most of the time. I think a lot of people make a lot of money off of that. Fear and anger are addictive, from crime to the weather; love and compassion are not.

I’m learning that this anxiety, this way of looking at the world, doesn’t just come from the outside. We impose it on the world around us and then on each other from deep inside of us. Rage and fear have crept into our neural systems.

For me, the spiritual life is my salvation,  both practical and powerful, my other choice, my better choice.

I am finally learning to think differently and live differently. It was hard.  None of us can focus on or understand all the problems that are raining down on us from everywhere, and organized religion, like politics,  seems increasingly ineffective.

We have to make our way.

I’m forming my ideas about how to see the world. Every time I can, I try to do some good, to touch a life. It is healing me and lifting me, and helping me to see the world anew.

This is the most potent medicine in the world for me; it is a true and natural cure for the poisons that fester inside of us. Suddenly, compassion has become revolutionary, and I am a rebel, a natural state.

We put so many words between ourselves and things.

God, once believed to be the creator and shaper of our lives, has been pushed aside by false prophets and priests, and people who live only for power and greed.

Like the most worthy people among us, God is on the sidelines now; nobody in power is listening to him anymore; God doesn’t have a ticket to get online or in a TV studio, where most people nowadays seek their Truth. God is an afterthought, on the sidelines, helpless to watch as his creations set fire to his beautiful world.

Nobody who argues compassion will last long on cable news.

As I learn to be alone more and more and to love being close to the reality of me and the world around me, I am learning to bring forth at least a few good words every day and a good deed or two. When I became open to good, it gushed like a waterfall.

When I opened up to love, I found it.

This comes in large part from the silence, which is the mother of Truth and meaning.

My healing, my path is to touch lives in a way that makes them better. That’s my work, my news.

Out of my silence has come a way forward, a path for me.

Don’t Get Mad. Do Good.

Touch a life every day.

It’s easy, and it’s free, and it feels lovely.

How many times have you or I felt wonderful or hopeful or peaceful watching the news or listening to a politician, our money day  Priests And Money Lenders in the Temple?

I touched life on the phone yesterday when I told a battered tech support person that I knew he was doing the best he could under difficult circumstances, and he nearly cried with gratitude.

I touched lives when I brought chocolate to the beleaguered people working in the pharmacy. I touch lives when I thank the nurses for the work they do.

I touched the life of a Mansion resident who desperately needed a big bra and a man there who desperately needed larger underpants.

I touched an Amish girl by finding the small boots she needed as she did her work on the farm with boots with holes like grapefruit. I feel the life of an Amish mother by finding her mittens for her newborn baby.

Next Wednesday, I and many others will touch the lives of the Afghan children just arriving in America by making sure they have toys for Christmas.

I do this keenly, aware of my many flaws and imperfections, and struggles. I am not a saint, nor do I wish to be one. I do this for me, to save me.

In my mind, Truth and compassion arise from the silence and inspiration that comes from being in and out of the tumultuous presence of the world. I live in these worlds; I seem to need both; one compliments and defines the other.

“Then,” wrote Thomas Merton, “sinking again into silence, the Truth of words bears us down on us into the silence of God.

  Or rather God rises out of the sea like a treasure in the waves, and when language recedes, His brightness remains on the shores of our own being.”