in thought, word, and deed

I got back from the beach on Monday and had a whole post planned out, but given the circumstances of the past few days, I need to write a different one.

I am thinking about people this week.

When I got back to my normal life, I found out that a Delaware friend would be out of town for a few days because her cat had to be put down and she needed to be at home.

Today, I received word that a friend of mine from college has been diagnosed with cancer. It sounds like he will probably make it, but the road will not be an easy one. And besides, we are 23. These things aren't supposed to happen to us.

A lot of things have been happening lately that aren't supposed to happen. Shootings, and mass shootings, and discrimination, and war, and robbery and assault and all manner of other things that hurt. These things hurt not only the immediate families or affected populations, but they affect the collective human psyche in potentially irreversible ways. These violences cause us to recoil, to curl up inside ourselves and put up our defenses and lick the wounds whose origins confuse us; why are WE bleeding and sore when it wasn't US who were shot? Why do we and our communities reel from the violences we commit against each other?

And then there are the hurts that are not committed against us by anything we can name -- like the cat, and the cancer, and other things we name in our hearts.

In these instances, we send out messages, beacons, to our mainstays and our loved ones. We ask for "thoughts and prayers." I always say I will pray in my own way, and regardless of any evidence of the healing power of prayer to one god or another, I think there is incredible power in Thought. I believe there is legitimate, nearly tangible power in thoughts flying in from all over the world, concentrating in exactly the place you need them most.

I went to Walgreens with a friend after Zumba tonight to look for a sympathy card. Most of them were awful. Lame at best. Most of them said to me, "I would feel bad if I didn't say anything to you right now, so here is my half-assed and partially thought-out clearing of the conscience." I know that I am unusual in that I HATE euphemisms, and I'm fairly comfortable with tears and suffering and depression and grief. The simplest thing that needs to be said is, at the core, "I care." I can't say anything more honest or more healing than that.

So I want to ask for your thoughts and prayers, dear readers, for these friends of mine, and for your friends who are undoubtedly also in need of thoughts and prayers, and for OUR friends. And for people at a few more degrees of separation. Thoughts and prayers do not run out like money or even words. Pain is one thing a lot of people share, and there is strength in sharing even pain. We can make ripples and waves in each other's lives, so, so simply. This I do believe.