“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness,” wrote the beloved poet Mary Oliver. “It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
This past year has been a giant box of darkness–and for many of us that box has been full of smaller boxes–a nesting doll full of darkness. On top of the pandemic and the election, we have experienced our own wrenching losses and loneliness. At different times, most of us have feared that hope is gone too, that life will never be good or safe again.
And yet…but still…each in our own homes, there are moments when we touch our deepest questions: Who am I? What am I really here for? At moments we may sense that we are here to wonder about that and we notice that being in question like this opens us. An inkling comes that we are here to take in impressions, not to do great things but to be touched by great forces.
“All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” wrote Julian of Norwich. How can this be?
“For there is a force of love moving through the universe that holds us fast and will never let us go,”wrote Julian (who knew about pandemics).
Tracy Cochran 
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