The news-feed is filled with despair this week and my news-feed equals Facebook, The New York Times, and the helicopter flying above my neighborhood at 6:30 am. Robin Williams took his own life, the cops are shooting citizens, and war rages in so many places on our planet. But I woke up today and found myself bathed in love. Why, I think, why this dosing of love?

It’s not hard to notice my nine-year-old sleeping almost on top of me. I can see my 12-year-old waking up so easily next to her oldest friend, the lovely 13-year-old Sy By Banana Girl. My husband does his weird happy morning noises. I drop my feet to the ground and find my Dansko clogs, the perfect footwear for my newly diagnosed plantar fasciitis. After days of feeling like the world is underwater, I’m in love with this life again.

I’ll tell you I’m a Gemini if you want me to clear the air of confusion. I’m down in the sewer telling everyone about the rats that carry the plague coming ever closer and then I’m up in the clouds asking everyone if they can see the red cardinals flying way over there, tiny specks that only I see. Like everyone else, I am a case study in contradictions. No one sighs louder than me and no one dances in the kitchen with quite so much joyful noise flowing out of her body.

To me it seems right and good to grieve Robin Williams with a million Facebook posts about how to spot depression and clips of his best movie moments. It’s also right and good to shut my computer down and go running towards my girls, full stop, into the activities of childhood, active moments of not caring that too many guns fill the houses in the United States of America. Last night my oldest girl and her oldest friend colored my hair blond in our blue bathroom. I was awash in chemicals and steeped in love. Is it any wonder I woke up happy, full of wonder at this beautiful world? I’ll take it, I say, and I’ll send it out to you, too. Have some, there’s plenty to go around.