What Comes After Darkness

Yesterday, my wonderful daughter-in-law sent me this You Tube speech by a young woman, an American Sikh lawyer, that–as she predicted–blew me away.

It appears to have been taped at a “Moral Monday” gathering, and it is eloquent and obviously heartfelt.

It’s short–under six minutes–and I urge you to watch it all the way to the end.

The message–the “takeaway”–is profound: darkness can be terrifying. It can signal death, the end of something, a descent into chaos and despair. Or it can be, as she points out, the darkness of the womb, the darkness that precedes a birth and a new beginning.

And as she points out, and every woman who has ever given birth knows, when you are giving birth you do two things: you breathe, and you push.

This lovely young woman reminds us that it’s up to all of us to breathe and push–to use this very dark period America is experiencing as a prelude to birthing a renewal of community, of civic participation and courage, of human connection and commitment to leaving a better, brighter world to our children.

Or we can shrug our collective shoulders and cede control to the looters and influence-peddlers who are currently (and shamelessly) treating American government as their piggy-bank and the rest of us their obedient stooges.

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