Up@dawn 2.0 (blogger)

Delight Springs

Monday, September 14, 2020

You don't hate Mondays...










Hope in stressful times

LISTEN. Margaret Renkl has once again found and borrowed the just-right words for what so many of us are feeling.

The news feels nothing less than apocalyptic. Climate change on irrefutable display as wildfires turn California and the Pacific Northwest into a furnace, as hurricanes gather and floodwaters rise. Universities returning to in-person classes just in time to worsen the already raging pandemic. Deepening economic pain as aid to our most vulnerable communities expires. Black men still getting shot in the back. Russia interfering with our election, and a Russia-supported president using the White House — our house — as a backdrop for a political convention that promulgated nothing but lies.

I could keep going, nonstop, until Nov. 3, but I’ll end the list right here lest your own blood pressure rise to a worrisome level.

I have friends who tell me that they can’t follow the news anymore, that it makes them too upset to sleep. It’s like the topless dancer’s advice in John Prine’s song “Spanish Pipedream”:

Blow up your TV, throw away your paper
Go to the country, build you a home
Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches
Try and find Jesus on your own
Blow up all your news and social media appliances, we may be tempted to add. I'm not looking for Jesus, but more peace and peaches would be great. Actually Jesus in this song does mean peace and equanimity, something like what the Greeks called ataraxia - "the ability to remain calm despite fear, anger, sadness, or stress." Prine's Jesus, like Tom T. Hall's, was a kind of Stoic.

And by a happy coincidence, we're talking Stoicism in CoPhi today... (continues)

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