Waking Up Despair

Waking up to despair, sadness, bone-tired at war with a beeping alarm clock, an alarming list of immediately urgent responsibilities without an opportunity in sight, or at least not this first despairing fright, at end of night. If this sounds familiar as at least your normal Monday through Friday, you probably need a better way toward bed the night before. Most likely, earlier. But also, even for many with mindfulness practices, disciplines with their own short and long-term rewards for both natural and spiritual health, remembering gratitude is our interior face of grace's exterior face, or karma's exterior influences, or love's potential winners winning full circle in theory, yet too anemic during this dreaded alarm clock time. If yours is solely a morning contemplative practice, after you wave the kids off to school, after the gym or the run, after the personal hygiene, it is already too late to optimize your opportunity to wake up with least claustrophobic despair and most expansive hope building toward faith that this day just might be even better than yesterday, as utterly remarkable as yesterday appeared as you were mindfully drifting off to sleep perhaps even before greeting GrandMother Moon's new through full repeat performances. She'll be here all week, visible and sometimes invisible, guarding your restorative rights and responsibilities toward regenerating tomorrow's realistic gratitude for renewed opportunities to brush your teeth, and greet each child and significant other, to notice if these wake with a smile toward this day, or with a scowl for lack of sleep or a good dream interrupted, and recognizing how this is two ways of saying one important not yet thing which can build toward despair, and further lack of more therapeutic dreams. It is an important personal and also political choice to prepare for sleep repairing for tomorrow's grace or in dread against our memories of grace's lack, apparent absence, persistently stuck issues too overwhelming to think or feel our way out of, through, beyond. These are important items for evening contemplation too. But, when I am making my lists, I start with minuses, drift off counting my appositional pluses. They are both there within us if we can choose restorative faith after our lights turn out. In this sense we can choose our karma, our awareness of positive and negative grace. Love's tones of restorative therapy and retributive punishment, if not yet quite overwhelming gratitude, also not awakening to further despair from chronic days of self with other abuse and neglect. I continue having a dream that the night everyone in military-industrialized cultures drifts off feeling graced with opportunities to become and do every cooperative thing we can to guarantee Earth's future of healthy exterior climates, that is the night before our first morning arising together without overwhelming internal competing despairs. Faith that this restorative therapeutic day could unfold no less grand than this dream we shared our polypathic demilitarizing dis-industrializing less exhausting night before.