I’m sitting in my cabin in Rockbridge County, Virginia, with a March wind  whistling down from the mountains and a fire in the woodstove.

I’ve been here for about nine months now. Two and a half years after we packed up and sold the family house, got rid of as much stuff as we could and put the rest in storage, as I was unpacking, I found myself actually talking to inanimate objects. After two years of COVID, the loss of beloved family, and multiple temporary dwellings, it was weirdly comforting to be reunited with bits of the past. I guess, once again, that’s what I see in material things … they are just reminders – but reminders they are — of our lives, our loves, our shared humanity.

And then the refrain from the old Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers song started running through my mind: “Don’t – have – to live like a refugee, You don’t have to live like a refugee …”

Yes. And no. No, we don’t have to live like refugees, and yes, that’s the hard truth of it. We don’t, and I think we can’t, know what it is like to leave a lifelong home and not be putting those treasured relics into storage but just to be running for our very lives. Not carrying too much because that could be fatal, if it weighs us down, or causes even a moment more of thought or indecision.

And that refrain has been living with me for the past nine months. After the war in Ukraine started, I put a monthly donation on a credit card for the International Rescue Committee. Just today I inadvertently happened upon a spokesman for the IRC online. He was reminding us that there are 70 million refugees out there on the planet. It’s probably a lot more since he recorded that.

I am haunted by the knowledge that I cannot know what it feels like to know that I will never again see the life I knew — instead, just be grateful for the life I have. Haunted by the knowledge that families are desperately clinging to the tops of train cars to escape untenable lives in Central America; that the Polish and the Belarussians are facing off over migrants on their common border; and then – then, there’s Gaza, and Haiti is in flames. And yes, you can actually be a refugee in your own country or what you thought was your own country.  Words truly fail.

Here in the Valley of Virginia, the town of Lexington has taken in refugee families and helped them acclimate and move on to places where they can find work and a community where people from their country already live. A few miles north of here, the local NAACP chapter has put up a welcoming sign for all people who come our way, whether to stay or just passing through. These efforts can seem small, a drop in the bucket, but I also know we can’t think of them that way. It’s a start. And we forge on.

A local minister speaks regularly about hope, which she defines as “earnest expectation.” This minister happens to be an African American woman who well remembers the era of segregated schools that both she and her mother attended. They both went on to become formidable educators. Her definition is just what you are reading into it: Hope is not about waiting around for a solution; it’s about doing it.

Her hope gives me hope. We start from where we are.

To that, I will just add a prayer for peace, justice, and love of our fellow humans in this world. By prayer I simply mean putting out our best energy in the most focused way we can to raise energy for the good on this planet. The stars are with the voyager, poet Thomas Hood wrote.  May it be so. As the spring equinox signals the ancient start of a new year, may the months ahead bring our Earth’s refugees some peace and safety.