What do we think?

One of my friends says, "I know we all have beauty, and I am sincerely good at knowing and seeing that... but..." I know what she means. I know that everyone has a story that will break your heart; everyone has a glow somewhere in their soul that makes them remarkable; everyone has the capacity, and often exercises it, to act with extreme and often unplanned compassion. But... sometimes the ability to see that, or perhaps to experience that, is taken from us by anger or fear or need.

The lives of others really are a mystery. And it's their lives, how they experience those lives and how those lives become part of their very viscera, that influences how they see the world and how they act in it. We can never fully get inside their skin. Not without the however-many-years of lived experience in that skin.

How, then, can we judge?

So, you desist from judgement. But you still have to deal with them, don't you? Somehow respond to the foreign-sounding views and see the strange world that they appear to inhabit and to which they respond.

Is it perhaps the case that we do, after all, construct our own world? seeing in a neutral face the anger we expect to see? Hearing in the neutral tone the contempt we feel for ourselves?

Meister Eckhart wrote, "Love is as strong as death, and harder than Hell." I really liked that and then I realised that he meant that love survives death. That the universe is love and death releases that which matters of us (the soul, the love) into this disembodied ethereal zone. And I though, oh no, not another. Instead, I heard that line and thought of tough love. Of no bullshit love. Of love that says, so be it. And, it's time.

Martin Buber wrote, "Play is the exultation of the possible." That, I can buy in to.