Veterans Day has taken on a deeper and more personal meaning for many people this year,  given that many of us have been feeling battle weary following an election cycle that started over 18 months ago, if not even longer back in time. It’s a relief to be done with the relentless parade of political commercials and related advertising, and I wonder how much money was spent in total for this year’s campaign and electoral cycle. I suspect it’s in the billions altogether, and it’s too bad all that money cannot seem to be harnessed and channeled toward a greater good.

My dad, who turned 90 last Saturday, is a veteran of World War II. His brother Jack died in a German P.O.W. camp several days after the jeep he was traveling hit a land mine. This happened in Belgium, in late 1944. More than half a century later, in March 1999, my dad and I traveled together to the Allied Cemetery near Liege, Belgium to honor his brother’s memory, and it was an emotionally cathartic experience for both of us.

What really haunted me there were innumerable crosses remembering so many people who died in war. I thought of the collective energy, mindset and resources that it took to end this particular conflict  Standing there silently together at Jack’s gravesite, I palpably and deeply felt the loss that my Dad, his oldest brother and their mom must have felt when they received the news that my Uncle Jack, age 20 at the time, would never be home again.

I am thinking today, too, of how and on what we spend our individual and collective energies, mindsets and resources. I hope that with this election cycle now hopefully behind us, we’ll also choose to invest in healing and rebuilding divisions, rather than throwing white gas on and igniting them. I hope we will move forward by choosing to see the good and the potential in all people, and invite and include everyone at the table. We all have some room to grow and heal in these respects.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his first inaugural address,

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Nature is one of the best places in which we all grow and heal and come home.

Let’s all take a collective deep breath, exhale, and dive in to experience nature where we live, work, play and create community.

It’s one of the best ways to bring more peace, healing, calm and lightheartedness into a world that has been hungering for it for far too long.

Count your blessings, share your gifts.

Bury the hatchet, heal the rifts.