I am tired of waking to headlines of atrocities. I am tired of...

I am tired of waking to headlines of atrocities. I am tired of living in a place where human life is so disregarded. I am tired of looking at the calendar and shaking my head in complete disbelief that it’s 2016 and still, still now, there is such a thick and impenetrable fog of racism and prejudice and hatred that people are dying for it. I am tired of people hurting each other, for no other reason than the color of their skin. I am tired of the divide, this Grand Canyon gap between so many people all living inside these drawn borders. We are all children from the same Mother, we are all brothers, sisters, we are all cousins and we are systematically destroying our family. This is bigger than guns and the right to own them, this is bigger than Congress and their inability to come together. This is bigger than all this, this is about the divide and this is about the hatred…here and everywhere. We are a world split, fractured and splintered in dozens of directions, the veins extending out and still pulsing, not with life but with anger, with hate and mistrust. We cannot fight this with more hatred, we cannot fight this by digging trenches and taking sides, we cannot fight this with more fighting. We must become the ceasefire and the bravery to walk across the lines that we never wanted drawn. We must be the love that grows like a forest fire, if from a spark, if from here. We must look across all these cracks and find all the ways we are the same, not different. We are one soul wearing 7 billion faces, and we must set down these tools of self-destruction and love ourselves again, every face of these spread out billions. We must change, and we must begin today. There is only one way, and love is it, it’s always been it. My heart is broken today, again, and broken the most for how commonplace it is to wake up feeling this way. There is light in us, still, and the closer we all stand the brighter it can grow.