today i saw myself for the first time
when I dusted off
the mirror of my mind
and the woman looking back
took my breath away
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I’m sorry,
Please forgive me,
Thank you,
I love you.
To vulnerable me, from critical me.
❤️????
Hawai’ian practice of reconciliation and forgiveness
The worst thing we ever did
was put God in the sky
out of reach
Once, I ran from fear
so fear controlled me.
Until I learned to hold fear like a newborn.
Listen to it, but not give in.
Honour it, but not worship it.
Fear could not stop me anymore.
I walked with courage into the storm.
I still have fear,
but it does not have me.
I am firmly of the view that this societal fixation on forgiving others is just another way that we bypass our own rightful anger, confusion, sense of loss. It is also a way that victims end up feeling blamed for their experience.
Sometimes, I feel that my life is a series of trapeze swings. I’m either hanging on to a trapeze bar swinging along or, for a few moments, I’m hurdling across space between the trapeze bars.
Look how a mirror
will reflect with perfect equanimity
all actions
before it.
Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from we come and to which we shall return.
James Baldwin
Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness.
Mary Oliver’s Wild Geese for Corona Times
You do not have to become totally zen,
You do not have to use this isolation to make your marriage better,
your body slimmer, your children more creative.