This is not easy

When I listen to Deborah Parker speak from her heart, I think of Sabine, and her raw pain and the something else she and Deborah Parker and so many of us have that can be there with the pain that is so real and present and unequivocal.

We are not alone.  We can turn to the power of good memories and the power of beauty and the power of community during times of raw pain. Deborah Parker's words remind me of what I know of  you, Sabine.  It is not easy.  It is not easy.

Art That I Can Hear

From the Friends of Silence newsletter for July and August of 2015:

Art is both love and friendship, and understanding; the desire to give. It is not charity, which is the giving of things, it is more than kindness, which is the giving of self. It is both the taking and giving of beauty, the turning out to the light of the inner folds of awareness of the spirit.

~ Ansel Adams in a letter to Cedric Wright, 1937, as quoted in ART AS A WAY OF LIFE, ed. by Roderick MacIver

Meditation On Morning Light Through A Prism

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty

Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
- Robinson Jeffers

As I walked out the door toward the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn't leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I would still be in prison.
- Nelson Mandela

The healing of our present woundedness may lie in recognizing and reclaiming the capacity we all have to heal each other, the enormous power in the simplest of human relationships: the strength of touch, the blessing of forgiveness, the grace of someone else taking you as you are and finding in you an unexpected goodness.
- Rachel Naomi Remen