Love Your Country

I was quite surprised when this saying (and it's companion Love the world) came through for one of the mediation pairs for my book, Opening the Heart: Meditations on How to Be (here). I think it would seemingly be hard to love my country right now with all the things going on here. 

But, I find it still easy to love my country because there are still many things right about my country. Yet, I think there is more to loving a country besides what is right about it. The meditation text that came through for this saying talks, in part, about loving your country meaning wanting the best for it and for those who live there.

What aspirations and hopes do we have for our countries? I think we can work towards those things, doing what we are able to do.

I wrote this poem to accompany this meditation image:

Love of Country

Sometimes I find it
much too easy 
to say how rotten 
my country is, to focus
on all that I view as wrong.
By doing that I can end up
living in fear and amorphous
terror and anger.

What I'd really rather
do is live in love,
nurture the compassionate, 
the kind, the growth of
change. Focus on the
good-heartedness, the
strength of character that
underlies so much.

What lives in my heart?
Love for my country.

©2017 Kathryn L. Samuelson 

The first image is from my book.

The second image was found on unsplash.com. The credit goes to: mcml-xxxiii-steal-my---art