I heard on NBC News last night that 60 people were shot, 9 dead, over the July 4 weekend in Chicago due to gang violence.

What??

A woman on the NBC video segment had it right, I thought. Speaking as someone from one of the affected neighborhoods, she traced the violence to hopelessness. I wish I could find the video online. I wish I could show you that woman’s sad, astute face.

This news comes to me the day after I have finally finished writing this website (took me a year); the day after I am busy finishing up the last pages, writing about the importance of holding tension during the spiritual process of being human.

The youths in Chicago clearly didn’t hold tension. They clearly let all the intolerable fear, frustration and adrenaline pent up inside rip out their veins into their wrists steeled against quaking rage, aimed down their fingers, blasting into a terrible world that they could validate as being all the more terrible by unleashing corporal damage on another human being. At least in so doing they could prove themselves to be right in their horrible convictions.

Certainty borne out. But at such a price.

Einstein said, “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”

Yesterday upon finishing the website, I looked back over the computer logs and was startled to see that I had started the website exactly a year before. Started on July 6, 2013. Finished on July 6, 2014.

This morning upon finishing the website, I walked out into the garden to see that my Gen 2 sunflowers – offspring of the original sunflower that guided me to start this website to begin with – were, that day, beginning to bloom. Kinda wild, huh?

Lao Tzu talked about Wu Wei: the effortlessness and harmony that come from living in a completely natural, uncontrived way. Without control, force or the attempt to influence.

The news last night was not just about Chicago. The news last night was about our lives – all of our lives – and all of our struggles, in a world that seems to be going increasingly mad.

What will be your center point? The place where you can rest in Wu Wei? What will be the source of your hope, your miracles, your ability to hold your own tension?

I promise you, my friend: it is in you. It is all around you. It is the stuff of Being itself. It is who you are.