We are having a rough time in America.
President Trump is lighting bonfires everywhere, with his wildly controversial, alarming appointees and declarations. People are raging against one another, perhaps like never before in this country, at least in our own time.
Extreme behaviors are now emboldened and normalized. We are ripping apart from a society that had rules of (mostly) obeyed connectivity.
Most alarmingly, the media is no longer a trusted voice of truth providing the grounding of facts. We are awash in conjecture, fear, and bitter reaction.
The rains of hatred are turning our roads formerly paved with civility into rubble. We all now must travel on these broken roads of America.
How not to blow out our tires and the engines of our hearts?
We must take heart and give heart.
We can take heart in the things that refuse to be tainted because they are built on bedrock, every day, by each of us, if we choose.
What things are these?
Let us never underestimate the power of offering compassion and love.
Anyone who has stood up in brutal winds knows that the opposite of love is a mighty destroyer.
Love, contrary to all that was formerly advertised, is not indestructible.
Love must be constantly practiced. It is an energy, after all.
It is a power that, like with the Etch-A-Sketch childhood toy, very neatly disappears when removed. No matter how deeply you engrave it.
Alarming news, I know, for those of us dyed-in-the-wool romantics. No, love is not all around us. (Apologies to the wonderful Mary Tyler Moore).
Love is not stronger than hate.
Love does not magically survive and conquer all else.
The IDEA of love is not all you need. (Apologies to the brilliant Beatles, and to much of the music of the sixties, for that matter).
The people who are supposed to love us often do not.
This is evident everywhere, for what is the rage and hatred about if not originating from a serious lack of love?
What is the dismantling of our country's humanity and care for each other about if not born from a lack of love?
Love is not a given. It is not bestowed upon anyone for any good reason.
There are no guarantees, no actions that insure that you will be loved in return.
There is only one, and one only, fool-proof fact about love.
If you give it, you will feel it. If you feel it, you will have it.
You give love to yourself when you offer it, no strings, to others.
To face this truth is to wake up to the responsibility of being a lover.
Anyone with a broken heart will tell you how disheartening lost love feels, how bleak.
Yes, love can be lost, can disappear.
As much as we cling to ancient love dreams and wrap ourselves around 20th Century songs as classic as George Gershwin's, "Our Love is Here to Stay":
"in time the Rockies may crumble/Gibraltar may tumble/they're only made of clay",
the reality is that love, too, is "made of clay".
Knowing what love starkly is and what it is not is bracing in a life-changing way and makes love possible.
Like a frozen box of Valentine chocolates defrosted in August, the power of love not used grows stale.
Love, after all, can be a canned, flavorless, rote idea, several expiration dates away from containing any pulse or feeling.
Don't count on love. Practice it.