Today I am thinking of Miss Neff. She was my high school history teacher and in those days we said “Miss” not “Ms.” She was somewhat of an enigma to me, small, very thin with bird-like features she always dressed as if she might be going to a business meeting later in the day. Maybe she was. I never knew much about her except that, once on her way to school, she had been involved in an accident where a young child was involved. To this day I wonder what happened. But today I am remembering Miss Neff for a particular moment in our World History class, one in which I was paying marginal attention, because all we ever studied was war, right? and I was tired of it and I was a teenager full of myself, of my dreams and of a narrow view of the world.

Miss Neff, standing in front of the room with her clipboard containing her notes resting on her bony hip, was outlining yet another war when she said:”At this same time in history, Mozart was writing music.” My head jerked up and, I could have fabricated this memory over time, but I thought our eyes met in a knowing way. She knew that I was a ‘music kid’ and that my plans were to study music in college. She then went on to name some artists that were creating and some writers that were writing. It was a moment when history became ‘both/and’ and not ‘either/or’ for me. I began to formulate a world view that encompasses all the many connections and complexities of how humans move in the world.

Today, when we are reeling from the news of what is happening in Ukraine, my heart is breaking for the people there. Mothers, fathers, children, grandparents, all holding a collective breath to see what will happen. Our minds trying to understand what possesses people to do what the leaders in Russia are doing and the feeling of helplessness that accompanies this. The fact of the matter is that we have lived a long time now with one foot ready to send us into the pit of despair. Four years of daily whiplash perpetrated by a president drunk on power. Then a pandemic that sent us into our homes, isolated us from those we love and those daily acts that made up our lives, that brought us a modicum of joy. A reckoning with the ways racism and injustice has been the food of our neighbors , of those whose lives have always been pushed to the margins.  And now war.

This is the moment to own the privilege with which I move through every day. That during all this time I have lived comfortably, knowing warmth and having everything I needed to eat, with resources to re-imagine ways of still being in community with friends and family. That privilege extends to the color of my skin and the resources that are always a click away. 

And yet today, with Miss Neff’s gaze etched in my memory, I am also naming the despair I feel. The knowledge that there will always be bullies and that their need for power and dominance causes others to pay a huge price. History books and sacred texts are full of their stories. While that gaze dusts itself off, I am also reminded that there are good things happening, things are being created, beauty is being born, compassion is being extended, healing is possibility. The both/and of the world still reigns.

So, today I will try to embody the lesson of my teacher and not allow the despair for the world to overwhelm. I will send fervent and gentle prayers to all that is Holy to be present to the Ukrainian people. The helplessness will still be there but I will also do something to remember. Here is a poem by Jane Hirshfield that might help:

Today, when I could do nothing.
I saved an ant.
it must have come in with the morning paper,
still being delivered
to those who shelter in place.
A morning paper is still an essential service
I am not an essential service.
I have coffee and books,
time,
a garden,
silence enough to fill cisterns.
It must have first walked 
the morning paper, as if loosened ink
taking the shape of an ant.
Then across the laptop computer -warm-
then onto the back of a cushion.
Small black ant, alone,
crossing a navy cushion,
moving steadily because that is what it could do.
Set outside in the sun,
it could not have found again its nest.
What then did I save?
It did not move as if it was frightened,
even while walking my hand,
which moved it through switftness and air.
Ant, alone, without companions,
whose ant-heart I could not fathom-
how is your life, I wanted to ask.
I lifted it, took it outside.
This first day when I could no nothing,
contribute nothing
beyond staying distant from my own kind,
I did this.