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Cynicism and despair are always the easiest reactions.

It’s a good time to remember that.

Love, with a capital L, is so much harder. 

Love is why it’s so hard to be a real believer.

You think it was easy for Christ to forgive his executioners, to ask God to forgive them, while he was hanging on that cross?

Love is our only way forward if we want “Love” to survive this time of disparagement and hate.

Perhaps we can learn from nature, from “lesser” animals.

Dogs give us everything they have, their entire lives, even when we beat them and abandon them.

Birds continue to sing, don’t they, despite freezing to death in the winter, or losing their precious babies to predators?

Maria Popova, whose weekly musings I am addicted to, tells the story of Loren Eiseley and his essay, “The Judgment of the Birds.”

“Eiseley recounts resting beneath a tree after a day of trekking through fern and pine needles collecting fossils, dozing off in the warm sunlight, then being suddenly awakened by a great commotion to see “an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak” perching on a crooked branch above. He writes:

‘Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents. No one dared to attack the raven.

But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the un-bereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries.

They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer.

There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged.

For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence.

There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush.

And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten.

Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing.

They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful.

They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven.

In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.”

Today, every day we live, let us be singers of life and not of death.

We each have our own song to sing, just like the songbirds.

Here. I’ve started. Will you follow?