From Freaking Good to Freaking Out

When you realize how perfect everything is, you will tilt your head back and laugh at the sky.

-Buddha

I came home today to yellow police tape, a scene straight out of the tv show CSI, and the news that my neighbor was stabbed just an hour earlier–outside my patio in the bright desert sunlight. “Don’t worry” I was told, “the stabber didn’t live here and anyways, these kind of things don’t happen randomly.”  How is any of that comforting?

Seriously.  I live in the suburbs.  In a gated community.  With a handful of questionables…but this man was not one of those, at least I thought.  He survived, I should add.

But I’m shook up by all of this.  And I don’t know what to make of it.  My first reaction of course, is we got to move.  But dang, I lived ten years in a very urban neighborhood, and heard gun shooting regularly, but never experienced something like this.  

There is a thick cloud hanging over my little community tonight.  I stood there for awhile taking it all in.  Children played catch with their football next to the tape, so they could hang out and watch the scene unfold.  College students stood there in a circle smoking and laughing.  Then there was me, feeling overwhelmed by the violence that still lingers in the air, that I started to cry.  

What makes a person come to this?  How does life turn in this direction?  How is EVERYTHING so perfect Buddha, that I should be laughing at the sky?

That’s when I realize how so very minor and small our existence is…but at the same time so huge and powerful our actions are.  It is not necessarily us that makes a difference in this world–but how we direct the energy that creates who we are.  We are just pushing energy around–this way and that.  Some push it towards light, and watch it as it grows with flowers and fruit.  While others take that energy and drag it around, carry it like a heavy weight that burdens them. 

We have a choice.  I have a choice.  What happened this afternoon, effects me.  Someone took their energy, covered in dirt and soot from being dragged a lifetime–and pushed it at me.  I see it sitting there, dark and empty, but filled to the brim with negative anions.  I have a choice. As simple, and even strange as it sounds, the only choice is to love.  To love so much more.  To love strangers, even the questionables. I don’t mean run out and shower them with kisses–or even make an effort to associate with them.  Because, they are still negative anions, to a life you’ve built on positive ions.  I mean make room for them in your heart.  In that extra space, find the truth of compassion. Give them love–where they only bleed and bleed.

If its only energy we are pushing around…then push back with love.  Maybe if tomorrow, every single person that reads this post goes out of their way to be kind to others, maybe together we can disintegrate this huge bag of darkness that arrived at my doorstep this evening.  Maybe if for the next week, we practice kindness mindfully and true, we can start to turn a community around just a bit.  Maybe if we dedicate months, dedicate years, dedicate a lifetime to practicing over and over again kindness..maybe we can sculpt the energy of this world into light once again.

Just by writing this, I feel a little better.  Where before I was circling around the event, suffocating from the violence, I now have transformed that energy into light–just by offering love to the universe.  It doesn’t take a big motion or a huge act on your part.  Just turning the direction  of your own heart and mind is the perfect start.

Peace & Love.