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Good morning.

It’s felt like the world has been holding its breath this week, watching and waiting to see if (among other things) the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas would stretch a little longer. Mercifully it seems it just might.. .

It’s all part of such an unsettling run of global events, continued war in Ukraine, changes brought by a new man in the White House. And it can feel overwhelming.

So it may surprise you that I found a glimmer of hope from speaking with a woman this week who’s filled with grief.

I had the privilege of interviewing the poet Rosemerry Trommer, whose teenage son died four years ago, in the same year she also lost her father.

Tears flowed, as she told me of her continued pain and sorrow. Yet her eyes were lit, as well, with a disarming radiance - as she spoke of the joy and wonder which, from her experience, still seeks to be found within all that is, if we’re willing to look.

It felt in a way like a metaphor for our times. And indeed as a poet she says that metaphor helps her - helps us - to explore and express the often paradoxical nature of the life we’re given to live.

I’m reminded of a powerful spiritual metaphor from the Christian mystic Hildegard of Bingen, who says we’re like birds who fly with two wings of awareness:

‘The one wing,’ she says, ‘is an awareness of life’s glory and beauty. The other is an awareness of life’s pain and suffering. If we try to fly with only one of these, we will be like an eagle trying to fly with only one wing’.

I’ve found that personally so helpful, as I’ve (for instance) dealt with the slog of chronic fatigue since Covid. It matters to sit with our pain and not push it away - but also to see the joy of life which often comes to sit here with us, too.

And as our geo-political world fractures faster into fearful binary opposites, I’m sure it matters to hold pain and joy together at this time, to find a richer kind of beauty here. To learn to love our unloved days.

Another poet, Ross Gay, finds joy in the ‘joy-ning’ when we reach out in love, often through our shared suffering or grief. Joy for him is not about ease from pain, so much as an end to our alienation from each other. I love that. We become whole by becoming part of the whole again. And rising, I like to think, on eagle’s wings.

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