I sit in the window and worry.

How might we stay tender in our anguish?

I sit in the window and worry.

It seems I can’t help myself these days. I wake up worrying, I drink my coffee worrying. I snap at my son when he puts something in his mouth only to discover it’s a cracker I gave him. He’s eaten it so slowly. I worry when he teeters too near a fall, when he holds something I can’t see. I am sure I allow him to do less than he is capable of doing. I worry about this too.

I sit at the window and wonder if I need to re-mortar our porch posts, if that is lead paint chipping on its floor, water damage in its beadboard ceiling. I worry rot will sneak up on me like my neighbor’s cat, taking a bite out of the little I have worked so hard to have. I think about the planet, the forests, the orangutan, his sad eyes, the fifty percent of North American bird species that will likely be extinct within fifty years. I think about our water, our justice system, our constitution. I worry.

I am so tired of worrying, but I’m not sure how to fix this. Sometimes I don’t think it’s fixable—my heart is painfully tender, and the world is full of suffering. Far be it from me to wish away my sensitivity, the bleeding heart in me that makes me kind, that compels me to change what I can—to pull up the tall grasses where that cat could hide to hunt squirrels, for example. To replace them with roses, dogwood, lavender.

This is all pondering in progress. I don’t have any answers. I don’t know how to live tenderly in this world, all its beauty and anguish, without losing myself in heartbreak and dark ruminations. I have picked up gardening and whittling, plan to try needlefelt and carving soapstone, signed up for a watercolor class. I need my hands muddy, working, and my mind with them, in case it helps.

I am teaching my son the names of birds, their calls. We play together on the shore of Lake Michigan, and he pretends to be a sandpiper. This keeps my heart soft, I think.

I hope.