Our Joy on a Dark Day

It has been a day. So many of us are facing despair and just have to remember to keep breathing. Things like jobs and homes and what happens next are not what they used to be.

I have one sister and her family of five plus two large dogs, moving from her New Hampshire home into the Montecito home of our parents due to the loss of her husband's job seven months ago. My other sister is trying to sell her Orange County home and relocate to Santa Barbara. She has two school aged children and two daughters just leaving for college. Her heart has moved out of her current house but she can not move the rest of her self until her house sells. Her teenage daughter plays volleyball at the varsity level and is in the market for a potential college scholarship, like her two older sisters. She can't just leave one high school and move to another mid season. She is torn. They are hurting.

The American Dream as it used to be imagined does not exist as a formula anymore. Going to college does not guarantee you a job when you graduate. Working hard does not equate to job security or a secure home life. We have to look at the world differently. Looking instead at each moment that we are breathing, each meal that we consume, each night of comfortable rest as a blessing. We can create, fully taking in the moments as precious, regardless of the state of our 401-K s and our job description.

We can look to our family, our community and find a new place to be and a new way to contribute. What we have is each other. We have the Earth, we have our creativity and our imagination. We have opportunity for extreme change and the option to adopt a radically new way of existing with each other and with our planet that does not involve large corporations, three weeks of vacation and barely making ends meet.

We may have to get there by a very rough road, but we can more than survive, we can thrive in a world of our own creation, unlike anything we have yet experienced.