Donald Trump's Next Life.....

Watching the impeachment hearings yesterday I was struck (again) by how extremely divided our country is in both perspective and fundamental belief systems. I know there were also politics, financial, and personal interests at play yesterday, but looking beyond the hearings, at the past few decades in our country (the time in my life when I've been actively involved in voting and caring), I can clearly see the ebbs and flows of progressive and conservative. We go from one to the other, back and forth, like boxers, trying to knock each other out. It's exhausting and confusing. For me the only answer here is to draw on my faith. I believe in a collective consciousness. I believe that we are all connected. Our thoughts, beliefs, feelings, actions, all affect all of us. I believe that the universe is a good place, filled with light and love, that the universe has our backs, and we're going to be okay.

Yesterday when my partner Nancy was sharing her deep sadness about the execution of Lisa Montgomery, I felt a surge of anger and hate towards Donald Trump. Donald Trump resurrected federal executions at the end of his term. We haven't had a federal execution in the United States since 2003, yet in 2020, we executed seventeen federal prisoners. Seventeen human beings. Lisa Montgomery was the first woman to be executed in seventy years. Last month, Brandon Bernard, just forty years old, was executed. Why would Trump want to bring back federal executions? What is wrong with him and others who support this barbaric practice? The anger and rage I felt didn't help me and it didn't comfort Nancy in her grief. It just swirled around in me like dirty water. 

As I meditated this morning, focusing on healing and patience, I found myself thinking that, in another life, I might love Donald Trump. To be so vile and venomous in this life, Donald Trump will likely be profoundly kind, gentle and benevolent in his next life because he will have so much bad karma to work out. He might be the antithesis of who is now-- Barak Obama or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. 

Last night before dinner, we said a prayer for healing for two people close in our lives who have COVID. One is very high risk and now in the hospital. Yesterday in the car my daughter Lucia said, "Mom, it feels like the virus is closing in on us." She's right. It is. We are in profoundly scary moment. It is easy to lose faith. 

I have so much resentment and anger towards Donald Trump for setting a confusing, divisive precedent about masking, social distancing, and even believing in the Coronavirus. Our friends who are sick, so many people in this country who've become sick and died, could be okay right now. But Donald Trump is a deeply troubled man, poisoned from the inside out, a river of a toxic waste rushing through his veins. He's disconnected from humanity, from the collective consciousness, and so he continues to act in the ways he does, desperately trying to fill his hard, hollow heart.

But in the impeachment hearings yesterday, the overarching message I got was not vile, hateful, Trumpian rhetoric. It was grace in action. The voice of our collective consciousness flowed through. The innate goodness of the universe was present there. I wonder why the bad has to come with the good. I wonder why, if the universe is ultimately a good place, we have so much oppression and violence. I'm still contemplating that, trying to figure that out. 

There is no simple answer to why we are where we are right now. But this morning, as I imagined truly loving Donald Trump in his next life, I had a glimmer of understanding that we are not that different from each other, all of us humans divided. We're all part of a much bigger picture, a picture as vast as the universe. Some of us are in sync with universal goodness and grace, and some of us are out of step right now. No matter how divided we are in this moment, what side of the boxing ring we are standing in, we are in this together. It's easy to get sucked into anger and grief, but I have faith that someday even Donald Trump will find his way into the light.