How to keep your heart alive in dark times.

Last night, a dazzling green praying mantis appeared in my dream. She stood on the doorstep of my childhood home, still as a statue, her tiny arms folded in prayer.

I didn’t pause to honour her majesty. I rushed past, distracted, carrying a comb for someone who had no hair.

That says it all.

How often do we hurry past the miracles in our lives? How often do we overlook the people who love us—whether we are lovable or not? How often do we busy ourselves with tasks as useless as a comb for a bald man?

The world is fractured. Hatred grows more vicious each day. Cruelty seems endless. And yet—praying mantises still appear on doorsteps. Tākapu still gather seaweed for their nests. Two paradise ducks still march their chicks down the middle of the road. The ruru still stitches the night together with its call.

Nature keeps offering her gifts. But grief and horror can make it hard to take them in.

I have decided to listen to the mantis. To slow down. To notice. To let the good of life wash over me, even when the heaviness of the world presses close.

This doesn’t mean turning away from suffering. Genocide continues in Gaza. Our government is tearing down hard-won progress. Racism and cruelty persist. I see it, I name it, I grieve it.

But as Alice Walker so fiercely wrote:

“I think it pisses God off if you walk by the colour purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”

We must resist, protest, donate, boycott, gather, plant seeds for a new world. But we must also notice. Notice beauty. Notice kindness. Notice breath. Because this noticing, this gratitude, is itself a revolutionary act. It keeps our hearts alive when despair wants to shut them down.

A tree is not just a tree. When the Buddha’s disciples laughed, saying, “They call that a tree,” they were seeing its infinite magnificence, the miracle of a being perfectly designed to breathe out what we breathe in.

Everything in nature is a placeholder for the Divine, waiting for us to look closely enough to recognise it.

Don’t step over the dazzling green praying mantis on your doorstep.
Notice her. Bow to her.

This is how we keep our hearts alive in dark times.