Spiritual Sobriety Part IV - Witnessing Without Turning Away

A Few Words from a Heavy Heart

There are days when being human feels unbearable.
Today is one of them.

Another life was lost in violence.
Another child woke up in a world where her mother existed — and by nightfall, she did not.

No cosmic framing changes that.

Yes, I know there are larger stories moving through the sky and the Earth right now.
I know humanity is in the middle of a great reckoning — systems breaking, identities shaking, long-suppressed fear and trauma rising to the surface.

But there is also a four-year-old who will carry this moment for the rest of her life.

Both are true.
And I live inside that tension.

I can feel the planetary shifts.
I can sense the collective upheaval.
And I can also feel the raw, intimate cost of it when a single human life is torn from another.

There are moments when anger rises at the systems that keep producing this kind of suffering.
There are moments when my heart simply breaks.

And then there are moments — like now — when I realize my role is not to fix or to numb or to explain,
but to witness with love.

We are meant to feel the heaviness.
It is the signal that something in humanity has drifted far from its own heart.

We are meant to feel grief for people we have never met,
because beneath all the stories, we are not strangers to one another —
we are mothers and fathers, daughters and sons, woven into the same fragile human fabric.

This pain is not random.
It is asking us to look at one another through that lens,
instead of through the old reflex of othering —
the habit of fear, separation, and forgetting each other’s value.

When a life is lost, it is not “out there.”
It happens inside the whole.

The sky is in motion.
The Earth is in upheaval.
Humanity is remembering and forgetting itself all at once.

It is not pretty.
It is not gentle.
And it is not meaningless.

I don’t pretend to know how all of this resolves.
But I know this: staying present, staying tender, staying awake to one another in the midst of it — that matters.

Today, that is enough.