Wake Up!

“Whenever life turns to great darkness, this is not the end, but the beginning.”
Alexander John Shaia

I have not watched the news religiously for several months. However, I do check in periodically just to see if an asteroid is within the proximity of causing the next mass extinction or if the COVID virus has mutated enough so that the iconic red spikes have covered the ENTIRE surface of the virus. ( If that damn red-spike COVID image is blasted at me one more time, I think I’m going to scream!)

Am I being a bit too alarmist here? Have I finally succumbed to the pervading apocalyptic thinking of this extraordinary time in history? I need a break from all of this! Perhaps I could go live with the cave dwellers that were living in the sandstone canyons along the Colorado River as I treked across the US in the ’70s. Or live with a remote Berber family in the High Atlas mountains in Morocco in which cell phone and TV service do not exist.

Do you think I’m exaggerating? Let me list some of the media headlines of the past year. **Omicron May Be Less Dangerous But It’s Twisting The Nation In Knots ***The Doomsday Variant ***Covid Keeps Mutating into Scary Threats ***Don’t Let Omicron Affect Your Mental Health!

“The way that news is reported has changed significantly over the last 10-20 years. Nowadays we can hardly avoid it, many of us actively feel the need to seek it out, and its modern-day tone is increasingly emotive, its medium increasingly visual and shocking, and its commentaries increasingly negative and fear-laden.” …Psychology Today

How are you coping? What are you doing with alarmist headlines, news commentaries instead of news reports, and brutally graphic images which would have not been permitted 20 years ago?

We’ve got to fight back! We all have our ways of coping. What is yours? Perhaps it’s your faith, your optimistic attitude, your busy schedule, or strenuous exercise. One of the strategies that has helped me is appreciating beauty. I’m fighting back the negative with Beauty Bashing. Focusing on beauty. Appreciating beauty. Embracing beauty. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder so I can only speak for myself. For me, it’s experiencing beautiful light or color. It’s being swept away by song. It’s definitely a puppy. It’s a wise face wrinkled with laugh lines. It’s grace. It’s love.