Imagine being the least interesting person you know. You’re surrounded by folks who have all chosen to take their one wild and precious life and make a more interesting world. Your acquaintances are scientists, human services workers, and artists. They wake up in the morning and figure something out, alleviate someone’s suffering, or add beauty to the world. Or they are someone else doing something else that adds to the interconnectedness in a lovely way.

Then your country elects a different president and every time you open Facebook, one of those lovely people is losing their job.

Seriously. Everyone I know who does cool work is seemingly getting the rug pulled out from under them. The lucky ones are standing rugs with only tenuous grips on the floor. The last few months have been an education in how much the federal government funds, but in the disappearing act sort of way. The federal government’s money – OUR MONEY – which was promised and contracted stays in our hands the way water stays in a colander. The grants I work with, to help formerly homeless people are not in the proposed federal budget. I don’t like it.

Budgets are moral documents. So goes your resources, so goes your values. I’m living in a country that values status and dominance. We could do so much more.

My church is calling a new minister. She taught us a new hymn: Olam Chesed Yibaneh. It’s in Hebrew. I do not speak Hebrew; maybe you do. It was the English stanza that got me:

I will build this world from love

And you must build this world from love

And if we build this world from love

Then God will build this world from love

The English is apparently from commentary on the Torah lines that it comes from. Those lines are meant to instill the agency of God and in the context of the service, that we are agents ourselves in the creation of the world. There’s also a sense, heretical in some faiths, that God could be following our lead. (I do not worry about getting God right so much as I worry about getting living right. One of the most comforting parts of being Unitarian Universalist is that I’m not expected to get the unknowable and unconfirmable correct so much as I am encouraged to keep my curiosity. There is so much to be curious about.)

If we build this world from love! If. There’s an implicit threat, if you do not build the world from love, you’ll get something else. Something ugly.

What does it mean to build a world from love? It probably would have a lot less weapons, a lot less prejudice, a more use of power to ensure well-being and less for domination. Arms of the embracing type and not the assaulting type.

I have a lot of agency, but world-building is a bit out of my scope. My surroundings though? I have influence there. This hymn has been running through my head when trying to decide what to do next.

How do I build my world from love? Well, I show up for my kids and husband. I answer the phone when a friend who is having a hard time is calling. I try to offer comfort to the grieving. I speak to the members of the community who are calling me at work with compassion. I apologize when I mess up, at least when I realize I mess up. And every pursuit is imperfect because I am a person and people are imperfect.

The news is terrible. Those with more power than I seem to be building a world based on death. We were all going to die anyway. The lost opportunity for fullness is hitting me like a grief, maybe it’s landing that way on you too.

I think about this driving through Buffalo, looking at the trees, the century-old buildings, and the road. They’ve lasted. They are ephemeral. I cannot say what the future brings, but right now I’m working to tangle myself and my loved and my liked ones more in the interdependent web. Let’s make a world as lovely as can be.