It’s past midnight, but I’ve been thinking about walls today and what makes them.

There is so much clamor, and it’s not just background noise. It’s the tune that sets the tone for how we relate to one another. It has people being offended because you didn’t include them in your daydreams, or over politics, or religion, or fashion, or what is the correct term for someone who is different from yourself, or where you live, or how many children you have, or if you dye your hair, or how tight your jeans are, or — W.H.A.T.E.V.E.R.

Do you realize that people are DYING? People are sick, or injured, or falling off mountains, or starving, but all the conversation is about how we are offended because someone else’s politics doesn’t match ours. People are crabbing because they don’t like the terminology someone else uses to express their feelings. Some people are resorting to name-calling and objectifying (dehumanizing) others. Some raise a fuss because someone shared a thing on social media without first clicking “like”. And then some other people are deciding that any one of these things is a good reason to shoot a gun. At PEOPLE!

I’ve had 5 people I know die in the last month. FIVE, and it’s made me super aware of how important every day is. And that we need to cherish our time together, and take a lot of pictures, because we might not be able to do it much longer. Do we really want to fight about who had the first idea of how to celebrate Thanksgiving this year, and whether everyone was included right at the very moment the idea was birthed? Do we really need this contention right now? You know where contention comes from, right? The Devil will laugh his way to Hell’s hottest fire and drag us all with him if we let him sucker us into his way of doing things.

Seriously, People. Do we really want to keep building walls between us? Do we need them there? Remove a brick. See what happens. You might like what you see.

Mending Wall by Robert Frost, 1874 –1963

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
No one has seen them made or heard them made,
But at spring mending-time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall between us once again.
We keep the wall between us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
‘Stay where you are until our backs are turned!’
We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
‘Why do they make good neighbors? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That wants it down.’ I could say ‘Elves’ to him,
But it’s not elves exactly, and I’d rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’

(Read and Follow the Directions)

Here’s my spiritual thought for the day. You have to do the work to reap the benefits.