There's sadness in the air this June.

The news of a doctor, shot in a Kansas church. A local man who took the life of his own children in despair, here in Oregon.

It seems to me that killing someone like this is the ultimate act of selfishness. It denies personhood, it says that the killer is somehow better or more righteous than the person who loses any chance to live a life that could prove that assumption wrong.

And while these deaths do not touch me directly, they've made me stop and think and feel sad and wonder about the senselessness of it.

Just thinking about it today, while girl2 was at her Japanese class, I remembered a book I'd just read to her yesterday called "God's Dream" by Bishop Desmond Tutu. Now there's a man who had direct, personal experience with sadness and evil, and selfishness.

I'm not mentioning this book here because I think it explains why people kill, or that it will heal grief, or any of that.

Nothing does that, not really.

I'm mentioning it because I think one of the only ways we can get through our days here on this messy, difficult, toilsome earth, is by remembering that what we do matters.

Each day. Each moment.

As the book says, there is a piece of god in all of us. And when we cry or hurt, god cries with us.

And when we are kind, and heal each other, and forgive, then our pieces merge together, and some of god is made whole here on earth.

And so that gives me a little hope. Because its hard to live without believing that somehow, those of us reaching out to eachother, trying to make our little pieces of divinity whole, outweigh those of us trying to snuff it out.

ETA: Another PDX mama's views on another local tragedy of the Sellwood bridge killings.