How to Live With Overwhelming Tragedy in Modern Life

Another day, another mass shooting in America—this time, 12 dead in a California bar. It's tragic that America choses to live this way, and beggars belief that there are still those who continue to defend the indefensible: the so-called right to bear arms.

At what point will the violent insecurity that is known as the second ammendment be seen for the anachronistic obscenity that it is? How many more innocent souls must die?

No other developed nation comes even close to the rate of US gun violence. Americans own an estimated 265 million guns, more than one gun for every adult.

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Beauty, in all its indivisible forms—visible and invisible, physical and spiritual—is the only antidote I know to this poison that we, daily, absorb in modern life. So, I share below, images of the rising sun that I was fortunate to capture this morning and a poem of spare and sustaining grace:

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Clearing

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Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.

Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.

Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worthy of rescue.

—Martha Postlethwaite

Forest photo by nature photographer, and friend, Kent Burgess