Was out walking in dreary, cold, wet January afternoon, yesterday, going to five stores in an attempt to find an appropriate birthday card for my son Colin Cudmore, who, five months on, is still paralyzed from the waist down and, I imagine, watching the same dreary scene outside the window from his bed in a local Care Center.  (I post on his journey daily here).

I failed to find a card, but I did come across a beautiful little booklet in the final store, Staples, with a watercolored butterfly on the cover and this lovely quote: “Inside us there is everything.” YES! Grateful. I bought it.

About halfway through my shopping trek I had been struck, forcefully, by the general mood of those I passed by. Whereas usually, I can make eye contact, and even soul contact with a genuine smile, yesterday I’d say nine in ten ignored me, so immersed were they in their inner purgatories, appearing exhausted, worried, weak, even desperate, defeated, as if wetiko had hung its swampy grey fog over their corporeal selves and banished the soul.

Is this generalized mood of depression just due to mid-winter blues? Just due to rent, food, utilities, insurance, property tax, gas price inflation? Just due to the continuous purging of corruption in the political/medical/academic/media/financial/entertainment arenas, our former heroes exposed as villains? Just due to exposure of child-trafficking networks? Borderless cartels? Tunnel systems and DUMBS? To Fentanyl poisoning and death? To weaponization of the rainbow?

I wonder. What are they picking up on the tel-lie-vision now? Of course I don’t watch it. Never could, even as a kid.

When I got home, before doing my daily late afternoon practices (yoga, chikung, taichi), I watched a video that Colin’s healing cousin Megan had sent to us the evening before. So glad I did!

Yes, never, ever, ever, give up.

Sure wish I could get this video to all the sodden folks I saw yesterday.

Whatever we wish for, starts inside.