To the carers....

This is to the carers in this world. The people who care even when it doesn’t make sense. Even when its none of your business to care. Even when there is little to no hope for positive change…but you care anyway. You bestow love and care because you have to. Its in your genetic make-up to feel the pain of others and to walk alongside and to hope for the best. 

This is such a strange and unprecedented time in our world. If you are a carer it must be weighing on you. It weighs on me. I think of my homeless people who have few to no resources available to them right now. I think of the emotionally and mentally and physically fragile ones who are doing everything they can just to keep their heads above water. 

I think of my adult children whose jobs are either slow, or shut down, or logistically altered in ways no one knew were possible. I think of my grand boys and all of the play dates they aren’t having. Its summer and the pools are closed, no afternoon matinees with candy and popcorn. 

Yes, we are figuring out new ways, very organic and wholistic ways to have fun. Its wonderful and fresh and simple and in many ways…a gift,  but these are such unsettled and frightening times. The regular stresses that we all carry on a daily basis, the “life stuff” feels heavier when you are living in isolation or sweating to death in a mask wherever you go. The weight of what used to be ordinary, threatens to break us today. Throw in a health crisis, or an unexpected financial loss, and you have the perfect recipe for panic and despair. 

So what to do? The one thing I have really dug my heels in on, is that I refuse to stop feeling. I refuse to stop caring. I am a firm believer in feeling our feels until there is nothing left to feel. Until we have wrung every last drop out of them….and then get up, brush ourselves off, and continue on. In kindness, with love, being gentle with our fellow travelers, and hanging on to my faith that something, someone bigger than us knows the future, and is able to fill us with all that we need to walk that future out. Its all I have today. I feel the weight of our circumstances resting on my shoulders and all I can do is say, “Ok. I accept this weight.” My prayer has been “Show me how to do this.” Show me how to do this and be a vessel of Your love, of Your hope, a light in the dark places. 

I don’t know what comes next…..but what I do know is that we all have to find our way to navigating it in kindness and love with one another. People are hurting and afraid… be kind. 

With so much love…..

Annette 

“The light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.”

                                                                     John 1:5