My friend, Lin, left town this past week to go back home to California. It’s been hard to believe that she had been in Chicago three months. She faced a myriad of delays on the rehab work she came to oversee on the property she bought over a year ago.

Her husband picked her up at the San Francisco airport where she was greeted by orange skies and smoke from the wildfires.

In these past three months, the country lost many more people to COVID-19. There have been ongoing protests for social justice (even as the killings of unarmed black men by police have not let up), and more lies made the current occupant of the White House have been exposed.

The post office can’t do its job because it’s been gutted from within. Legislative initiatives for desperately needed financial relief for working families have stalled. More and more people are on the verge of hunger and homelessness.

Exchanging texts the day after her flight, I inquired after the fires. A few fires came within miles of her home a couple years ago.

She sent a photo of the opaque orange sky that hung over the Bay area and mentioned seeing the movie Jo Jo Rabbit on her flight. She said that she was really taken by the Rilke quote at the end.

I saw the movie at a nearby Cineplex when it came out. (Remember wide screen viewing and plush velour upholstered auditorium seats?) I remarked on liking its inventiveness and how impressed I was with Scarlett Johansson playing against type but confessed that I couldn’t recall the quote.

Thanks to Google, my friend was able to text Rilke’s words.

Let everything happen to you. Beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Over the past few days, these words have penetrated me in so many ways.

I had to wonder why Taika Waititi, writer and director, chose to end his movie with these words.

Jo Jo wanted to idolize his father, a soldier, who was absent from his life. It was purposely left unclear if he was killed or was a deserter. While the film’s over the top satire might not be everyone’s cup of tea, it is clear that a key message was that amid the atrocities of war, the extreme ethnic hatred of this war, examples of love could be found.

Risking their own capture and execution, German citizens and people from various occupied countries hid Jews to save their lives. In war, beauty, as acts of love and sacrifice, and terror abound.

I also had to wonder about the poet, Rilke. What was he trying to say?  Again, I think about love, which transcends rational goals related to self-interest, but I also thought about HOPE.

This past Friday, as a country, we commemorated the nineteenth anniversary of 9-11. I watched news segments of how Trump and Biden participated in observances. Again, I thought about terror and beauty.

I don’t think any of us will ever forget what we were doing on that crisp and clear Tuesday morning. The images of the two commercial airplanes exploding into the upper floors of the iconic skyscrapers are imprinted in our psyches. In this event, we connected with the beauty of love and sacrifice.

First responders in NYC performed incredible acts of courage. The passengers of United Flight 93, in preventing their plane from making their hijackers’ target, acted selflessly. The whole world, regardless of political bent, seemed to share our grief and stood ready to support us.

Many times over this past weekend, it was brought up that 3000 died in 9-11, and almost 200,00 have lost their lives in this pandemic. Yet, there has been little or no public recognition of our collective loss in our current battle.

As we head into the fall season and new school year with what seems to be incomplete plans to control the virus, Americans seem to be especially hungry for a leader to provide reassurance, to recognize our collective anxiety and loss, to remind us that we can handle this. We will survive and come out okay.

Maybe our leaders have come up short when called upon to invoke the right words. So, we have to learn to say them to each other.

I was touched when my friend repeated a line from a poem that resonated with her.

Providing inspiration, gifting each other with hope in the words we chose to share, is no small thing.