Sometimes life is hard. As you know, I’ve been harping a bit on this this month. Trying to stay faithful to Love and Peace when your heart is broken is a challenge. And you stay faithful by not forcing yourself to work on a bruised brain.

And broken hearts and bruised brains don’t mean that nothing else will happen. There’s no insurance for this, no moratorium on the numbers of blows that can fall. Yesterday, my favorite oldest cousin called to tell me that her former husband, the father of my “nieces” had killed himself. It’s a sad, ugly and brutal story.

If you’d have asked me if I would have been able to step up and do what was needed, I’d have told you nope. But when the call comes, you pick up the phone. And then you pick it up again and offer the girls your heart. The UUs sing that old spiritual, “There Is More Love, Somewhere.” And somewhere it is. Because it’s there when you need it. And it holds you up and it carries you along. If ever Deb were with me she was with me [i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart) — thank you ee cummings] in the placing of that call. She loved those girls. She loved their girls. And so, in my grief, perhaps the love I got is the All Love and the love of Deb. Both girls said, “oh, we didn’t want to bother you.” But Love keeps swelling up and spilling out.

So there is more love, and even in the wasteland of grief, there are oases… and springs in the wilderness. Love. It leads us to Peace — because there’s more of that, too.

Maybe this is the answer. There I was, giggling about the fact that a rather taciturn guy, called us over to his table at our breakfast place to show us his grand baby, and the power of grand cuties struck me. He’s never voluntarily done anything but nod at us before. But this cutie, (and she was! Such eyes! Such a lot of hair!) inspired him to reach beyond his comfort zone so he could show us her pic. “Like grand babies,” he asked? Who doesn’t?

So is that it? could it be that simple? Could we stop focusing on the parents whose role is, after all, to be protective? Could we just ensnare every proud grandparent, dump them in a room with photos of cute babies and start them oohing and ahing? There’s that lovely place in Julia Ward Howe’s Mother’s Day address when she says (essentially!) that mothers must be too tender of other mother’s babies and hearts to send her kids off to kill theirs.

But since it’s often the grandparents who send kids off, let’s pack the pockets of the warmongers with pictures of their younglings and start every negotiation with not only pictures of cute babies but of proud grandparents loving. OK, we know it won’t be the only answer, but maybe it could be part of an answer. In the meantime, practice. Don’t have grandchildren of your own, put forward the kids you love. Ask to see kids that are loved by whomever you’re talking to. Peace Babies. Let’s make every child a Peace Baby! And of course that means that we’ll have to recognize every child as a Love Child. So precious and they’re all worth saving. Everyone should live in Peace.

I confess I got caught. I was up far later than I ever am because I was watching last night’s twitter feed. Finally went to bed to find everything they “knew” to be true, wasn’t. The kids who’d been ID’d as the bombers, are not the people they thought they were, so two families went through the horror of thinking that their children were either dead or monstrous perpetrators of evil. (I almost said creators, but evil and create are not compatible are they.)

I guess it’s a human need to think we’re in control. If we’re getting info, then we “know.” But Knowing doesn’t make the situation in Boston less dangerous. The kid on the run in addition to everything else is terrified and out of his mind and any choices he makes will be completely irrational… and therefore dangerous, both to him and everyone else. He feels probably as if he’s pulled off a great coup, his brother’s been martyred. Oh, the spin.

But what can we do? Watching TV, twitter (whoa… did twitter change the news last night or what?) won’t make a difference. I’m going to clean the living room. That won’t bring Peace but it will calm my mind and help me make space for whatever wonderful thing I next want to get up to.

Our responses to this mayhem must be new ways to Peace. Must be. Nothing I can tell but Love has ever created peace. Not the romantic kind. The big overarching kind. The Love beyond all boundaries kind. A deep and passionate commitment to bring that Love alive in the world in the ways we know. How do we balance pride in our tribe with fascination with others’ customs and traditions? How do we find purpose and meaning and make sure that everyone has that opportunity… and can do it safely housed, educated, well and on a full belly? Big questions for small individuals; but we’ve each got a thread in our hands. Time to unravel it and knit something beautiful together. Because we are people of Love… and that makes us people of Peace.

I recently read an article that said you can’t love the whole world, that that’s just too big a concept for our hearts to comprehend. I rarely argue with science, because science, like gravity usually wins. But if Peace depends on Love, because really, I don’t think tolerance is strong enough for Peace, then how do we get around our own very real constraints.

Certainly getting around our constraints to loving is the hard work of Peace. I think perhaps all I can do is love the people I encounter. And if you love the people you encounter and we love each other then love begins to spread across the world. It’s not easy, that’s for sure. Because loving the people I encounter requires going to my highest self. It means loving people despite, perhaps even because of their messy humanness. It means loving myself when I’m less than lovely. It means loving you when you step on one of my corns. It also means loving people who do really unpleasant things. It means, oh, darn it, releasing not judgment but judgmentalism. If I’m going to love, I have to find a way to accept people who stand for things that I abhor, even as I work to change those things, despite my awareness of them. It means being kind, when I am so gifted at snarky.

It doesn’t mean nice, which is such a namby-pamby kinda word. It means passionate about the world and its possibilities. Love is a demanding dance partner. But, oh! how our feet will fly!

Author’s note: as I was adding tags to this post, I noticed that love was not one of my tags. Slow, slow, slow to love the world. Still, we try. Enjoy this day of loving and being loved.