A Red Thread Kind of Day…

(And, yes, Grammy has been watching the news, again!)

I started my day trying really hard not to imagine that one of my personal kids was shot in the street after a graduation ceremony, like the young man in Richmond, Virginia last night. Along with his stepfather.

Which brought back the recent school shootings near Nashville, Tennessee.

And the shootings in Atlanta.

And… well, you get the idea.

These stories are in the top of the box labeled utterly avoidable tragedy in my heart because they all happened in places that exist in my perceived neighborhood.

There was, of course, more news. Pope Francis was having surgery, which seems to have gone well.

Then there was the avalanche of politics. And, yes, I have definite opinions on most of that!

One of those opinions is about the fact that the root of the word politics comes from the Greek for of the people. A notion many folks seem to have lost track of these days!

I drank tea and swore at the tv for a while.

I sketched out a new piece of the making it work better puzzle we’re sorting at our house.

I waded through the swamp of my mailbox, wrote the necessary responses, and cheered on a couple actually helpful local folks.

Then, my magic 15 minutes in a virtual room with a whole gaggle of good people working on things that are important.

All the while, the news was still rumbling around in my head. And my heart.

Clearly, it was time to fish in my Medicine Basket for a new red thread!

And a reminder of the ancient legend that we are all connected, even before we’re born, to the people who will matter in our lives.

When I’m by myself, I always start with all the names that come to my awareness, volunteering to help.

And, yes, my perceived neighborhood gets bigger, every time!

I’m not at all sure how the Pope would feel if he knew he was on my Red Thread, today, but even while he was under general anesthesia, he was reminding me of some more folks on my thread who taught us that the whole world is our neighborhood.

And, yes, the world’s gotten a whole lot bigger than it used to seem.

But, let’s play what if???

What if we lived as if the whole world was our ‘hood? Not in the way the MAGA crowd plays that game, but in the way we made space for it Tuesday afternoon.

You see, it was Mattering Matters time!

A small circle of bright, concerned, artsy-type women with red thread and hope, gathered from Atlanta and North Carolina to the San Francisco Bay area to Nova Scotia, CA.

Part of our conversation had to do with a recent question which formed inside me:

How do we feel FOR other people and not lose the ability to be grateful for what IS good and working in our lives???

The answers are probably going to take a bit more pondering.

For now, though, red thread is a start.

The words we used to close our circle help, too…

I matter. You matter. We matter. Mattering Matters.

You, by the way, matter, too! And Mattering Matters! I’d love to know what lights come on in your head when you make space for this notion! Leave a comment, below, or email me… suesvoice@gmail.com

For now, there’s another meeting about to start and – knowing this crowd – there’s going to be some mattering going on!

ps… the painting is my vision of a whole bunch of women in a red thread circle plotting more ways to matter!

pps… have some mattering ideas? Need some help figuring out how to breathe life into them? I’ve got lots of tools in my medicine basket that can help! Let’s talk. 45 min. My gift. The calendar elves will hook you up!