Finding sanctuary in balance

Over the past few weeks, I keep mentally returning to the Chinese Fable of the Farmer. I've posted it before. It goes to another one of my repeated messages which is all we can ever do is choose. Choose our response. Choose our action. Choose to accept or refuse. We choose to love or to fear.

In the past few weeks:

• A volcano has been erupting with lava and poisonous gas in Hawaii.

• A colleague in Pennsylvania coached his young daughter's baseball team as they played with a Miracle League team. His comment was, "In a world full of cynicism right now, this makes things feel right if only for a couple of hours."

• There was another murderous school shooting this time in Texas.

• My sister has been in Ireland for the last 10 days performing a small independent play and commented on one of those days: "Messy, cramped, with moments of poignancy, good work being done in a lost little corner of the world. To wax poetic about it, it happens every night all over the world."

• In Connecticut, a friend helped a depressed, suicidal friend get help.

• The #MeToo movement rebounded glaringly into the spotlight at the Cannes Film Festival

• People have been arguing over Yanni or Laurel.

• A prince married a newly designated princess. At their ceremony, a cleric said this: "When love is the way the earth will become a sanctuary."

All of this happened. All of this is life. Some of it is awful. Horrifying, scary, unimaginable. Some of it is sublime, delightful, deeply personal and wonderful.

Life can be immeasurably hard. And there are days when it can feel like it will never be okay. But we also have days when life is okay. In fact, it's good. It's poignantly, wonderful, happily good. And then it's not. And then it is.

This is our life. This is the Chinese Farmer's Fable. And what we are left with is our choice. When enough of us choose love, earth itself will, indeed, be a sanctuary.