[The opposite of fear is love.]

The prediction of 7 (7!) major hurricanes this year in yesterday’s paper was still very much on my mind when Allison, my California daughter, called. Predictably, this forecast had left me blue; hearing my daughter’s bouncy, animated voice cheered me up. Still. . .

When, after catching up with her exciting news, I’d admitted that I’m struggling with, you know, a pervading sense of DOOM, Allison responded perfectly. Not “Oh, Mom! You’re such a downer!” Not “I call you from 3,00 miles away and I get this?” Not  ”I don’t need this right now.” No way.

Instead, my California, always waiting for The Big One daughter asks me: “Do you have an emergency kit?” And then gently coaches me on how to prepare for disaster.

So, yeah, I’ll start to put together the things she suggested and other items that just make sense in case we lose water or electricity. I’ll get ready.

But what do I need in my spiritual kit? That’s a question I’ve started asking, too.

Stay tuned.

[The opposite of fear is love: this month's theme.]

Noticed a new feature in this morning’s Boston Globe: “Coping with less.” A pretty lame article re the closing of rest stops in Massachusetts, this new feature nevertheless sorta/kinda acknowledges what’s really going on: Yes, things are bad. No, it’s not going to get better.

Over the past couple of  years, every Wednesday night, I have had the great privilege of hanging out with people of color whose interpretation of what’s said by the media is ALWAYS startling. What’s said, what’s left out, who’s telling the story, who’s got a stake in the story, who, because of their rarified, white viewpoint, doesn’t have a clue what’s really going on; I get to listen to such conversations.

So, guided by these conversations and knowing what I know about climate change, about a global economy based on cheap oil—and its inevitable collapse—and the HUGE impact these will have, I read my morning paper searching for the Truth.

Surprise! it’s NOT there in black and white. It’s in code. Like this new feature: “Coping with less.”

Coping. As if. As if we all just, you know, shrug our shoulders, take a Valium, whine to our friends, grit our teeth but cope. Deal. Man up.

Is The Globe shouting: “Listen up, everybody. We all have to use less. It’s our dying planet’s only hope.” ? Naw.

Another theme I hear from people of color: ” ‘They’ don’t. . .  ” ” ‘They’ always. . .” [fill in the blank], “they” meaning the white-dominated power structure. And sometimes I agree. Sometimes I hear paranoia/conspiracy theory  and disenfranchised people giving “us” way too much credit.

But on this coded, not telling it like it is thing? I definitely see a conspiracy of silence. Take the two devastating rain storms we had in Massachusetts in March. Was there a front page article in The Globe saying: Yikes! Climate change is happening, it’s here, let’s get ready! Naw.

So where’s the love in all this mess? In us. Who, in countless ways, are showing that we’re sensing some fundamental truths. Yeah, even those crazy Tea Party people. All that anger? If someone, ANYONE in power would just admit the truth, acknowledge that a major sea change is happening, the climate (get it) in this country would radically change.

. . . only small things with great love.” —Mother Teresa—

Last week while watching my energetic grandson play in a Brooklyn playground, I happily sat on a park bench in dappled sunshine. A mother with two children joined me, a daughter about 4 and an infant asleep in his stroller. After greeting the trio, my attention returned to never-stopping Dmitri. Watching him dart from here to there, I nevertheless was aware of the 4-year-old’s persistent and nasty cough.

Her raggedy sounds put me in a terrible funk: I was immediately reminded of a dire article re an alarming rise in childhood asthma in the NE. The sounds of heavy traffic just a few feet away from the playground didn’t help my “Oh, God, we’re doomed—these precious children are doomed!” terror.

And given the weird weather we’ve had this spring, thinking her cough might just be allergies wasn’t all that comforting.

Confronting my pervading fears re global warming, climate disaster, etc, etc., and what life will be like for Dmitri’s generation, it actually helps to remember that as a young(er) mother, I’d had exactly the same heart-racing fears around nuclear proliferation. And to remember that amazing anti-nuke march in NYC when my daughter Hope was just a baby. (1981? 1982?)

And, thinking about Mother Teresa’s wise words, to contemplate what small, loving, life-affirming acts I can be doing in my small, precious part of this ailing planet.

Yesterday, leaving NYC on a Peter Pan bus,heading home on I-95 N, a truck caught on fire just ahead of my bus. What a scene! Billowing smoke, screaming fire trucks somehow getting past the backed-up traffic and, in very short time, a complex, beautifully organized rerouting process involving stopping all the traffic on I-95 S and miles of backed-up cars and trucks and buses on I-95 N—like the one I was on—crossing the median strip to get on I-95 S—and, presumably, alternative routes. (And yet my bus eventually arrived in Boston only a half-hour late.)

Having just left the Big Apple, where every newspaper I saw screamed something about the Time Square (botched) bombing attempt, I immediately assumed that truck fire was a terrorist attack. How could I not?

Well, here’s how: all this month, I’m going to write about fear and its antidote: love.

Keep reading.