Community members pray at a vigil for the 21 victims in the mass shooting at Rob Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

There is a heaviness in the air. At least that’s the way it feels to me in these days after Uvalde. Maybe it does to you, too.

Part of the feeling, of course, is the dismay and hopelessness that comes with seeing American innocents, mere children, slaughtered again. Another part is disgust at our country’s damning inability to prevent these things from happening so frequently. Are we sliding toward numbed indifference?

Then, there’s the shock of learning how this particular massacre played out, including the distressing discovery that police on the scene did much less than parents outside the school had every right to expect.

Finally, there’s just grief, plain and simple, at the loss of 19 children.

It would be easy to let despair or, worse, apathy win at a time like this. And that makes it more important than ever to remember, if we can, that all is not lost, that there is still so much good and beauty out there.

Here are a few places where I’ve found both — and hope  — in recent days.

A friend texted me the following a few weeks ago, after Opening Day in Albany: "If you want to start looking for evidence that society is not totally (messed up), Little League fields are not a bad place to start."

He couldn’t be more right, I thought on a recent night as I sat in the bleachers and watched second- and third-graders try to hit and catch without much success.

The kids in their uniforms jibber-jabbering from the dugout. The outfielders picking dandelions. The coaches encouraging, teaching and, most importantly, caring.

The teenage umpires. The volunteers grilling burgers. The parents watching, worrying and cheering from lawn chairs. The enthusiastic cheer that erupts when, improbably, a ball manages to stick in a kid’s glove. Oh my God, she caught it!

Watching Little League baseball is restorative. I can’t recommend it enough.

We have baby ducks in our garage. (It’s a long story that I'll save for another day.) And while there may come a time when I fully regret becoming an owner of poultry, this week I’ve found the ducklings to be a tremendous balm.

I mean, yeah, they’re cute. Quack, quack. But it’s more than that.

It is, as poet Wendell Berry put it, what "the peace of wild things" can mean when we are despairing for the world and what are children’s lives may be. Our ducklings go happily about their routine — dunking their heads in the water, nibbling on dandelions, huddled peacefully under a heat lamp — unaware of the mean, chaotic world beyond their brooder.

And as I sit watching them, so am I.

I visited Saratoga National Cemetery on Friday, where volunteers had decorated many of the veterans' graves with small American flags.

No surprise there. On this, Memorial Day weekend, when we're asked to remember those lost to war, flags will be ubiquitous.

But at a time like this, after Uvalde and Buffalo, it isn’t easy for many of us to feel patriotic. It feels like there’s something rotten in the nation’s soil, in its air, like the massacres we keep witnessing both describe and disgrace us. It feels as though Americans have forgotten something important. It feels like we're divided to the point of divorce.

Even when faced with unspeakable tragedy, we retreat to our corners and turn on each other. This is on you, we say with fingers pointed. Hate followed by violence followed by hate followed by violence, ad nauseum.

America, 2022. We're proud of this?

And yet, the flags. Everywhere the flags, flown not to suggest we’re living on a perfect patch of ground, flown as a symbol of the ideals we have yet to fully achieve. They’re flags of hope, in other words.

Few things are as moving as displays of religious faith by people who have every reason not to be feeling faithful.

One example is the Christian grace and charity expressed by members of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., who in 2015 publicly forgave the white supremacist who had killed nine of their fellow congregants. That kind of strength is religion's best advertisement.

And from Uvalde this week, again and again we see photos of grieving parents and community members standing together in prayer, at the very moment when many of us would be most tempted to doubt God’s existence or grace.

I wish I had that kind of faith, and perhaps someday I will. But in the meantime, I can still find hope and comfort in other people’s hope and comfort, in their confidence that we are loved and are part of something bigger and better than this troubled old world.

Churchill is one of the most well-known names, and faces, at the Times Union. His columns - published on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays - are shared heavily on social media and have won several awards. Churchill studied English and history at the University of Texas before beginning his journalism career at small weeklies in Maine, later working at the Biddeford Journal Tribune, Waterville Morning Sentinel and Kennebec Journal newspapers. He started at the Times Union as a business writer in 2007 and became a columnist in 2012. Reach him at cchurchill@timesunion.com or 518-454-5442.