When I reflect on our community, our country, and our world right now, I feel uncertain.
On the one hand, our government seems more stable, vaccines are rolling out, and kids will now return to school. On the other hand, it is as if a partly hidden ogre is slowly crawling towards us, underground. The beast has not broken completely through the surface, but we can see some spikes and some puffs of smoke rolling in our direction. When I talked on a recent Sunday morning to my old friends from Germany, the Netherlands, and Portugal, they confirmed this sighting. In Germany and the Netherlands there are street fights between right and left, and painful stories of conspiracy and treachery are being thrown about, especially on social media.
I asked my physician husband, Michael, “How can we understand what’s happening as if it was an ailment in the body?” Medical metaphors often help me to see more clearly the origin and progress of painful dynamics.