Writing should beguile us, not just take us from A to B to Zzzzz

5.57am and I__ finishing the last poem to the taste of the last cigarette. Smoke in my lungs, poetry on the paper. Inhale, exhale, it doesn__ get much easier.

One has to abandon altogether the search for security, and reach out to the risk of living with both arms. One has to court doubt and darkness as the cost of knowing.

I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

As the community stays with the uncomfortable tension of contradiction, individuals begin to perceive the truth of __he other_ as their own experience, and the polarities of conflicting positions often dissolve into an unexpected emergence of a deeper underlying unity: a profound recognition that, ultimately, there is no __ther_. We are all one.

Delving deeply in this [gender healing] work inevitably takes people on an inner journey, and, if they follow it far enough, they are ultimately let into an awakening of an expansive, all-encompassing love.