Last night as I was putting my 8 year old daughter Shalom to bed, she said in a soft, sleepy voice, "The universe is death." Of course I was taken aback and asked her what she meant by that. "Especially the grocery stores." she said. Now I was very confused. She explained to me how she had been in the grocery store with Daddy that day and had seen the lobsters and crabs in the tank at the deli. As a tear trickled down her cheek, she said "How would you like to be in a box waiting for someone to come and take you away to eat you?". My conditioned response was simply to make her feel better by saying that lobsters and crabs don't have feelings and that they don't actually know what is happening to them. Just as the words were about to leave my mouth, I fell silent. How do I know this? How can I possibly know what a lobster thinks and feels? So I sat in silence with Shalom for a moment and let my own thoughts ramble.

For a moment I thought about the atrocities of our world, and the incredibly horrible things that we as humans are capable of when we are not in touch with the feelings of others. I needed her to know that what she saw was real and to not mystify it into something irrelevant. As our tears flowed together, she wrapped her arms around me and began to settle into sleep. I whispered to her that humans do lots of terrible things, but that we also do many wonderful things. We all need to focus on the positive, while acknowledging the negative. Life is a dance of opposites, and we must find balance.

Today...allow the negative to exist, and then consciously choose the positive, and while you do, send a prayer to all the lobsters and crabs...waiting. They have feelings too.

in gratitude,

alice