acceptance

Countless times, I have imagined A. rising through the rivers of this land, to the surface of Florida to be found again, pulled into the air by new hands. The possibilities are endless, but most often I imagine him found by children. Above him, the sky shimmers and undulates blue through transparent springwater. Then four small brown hands break the surface and pull him into the air and into their excited and frightened vocabularies. The delicate bones of their arms and ribs absorb his voice, shattering their knowledge of what is possible.

For darkness terrifies. It swallows you, warps you, nullifies you. Who alive can possibly profess confidence in darkness? In the dark, you can't see.

You will never accept gratitude as a solution to your problems, until you have reached the last stage of grief--acceptance.

Chuang-tzu once told a story about two persons who both lost a sheep. One person got very depressed and lost himself in drinking, sex, and gambling to try to forget this misfortune. The other person decided that this would be an excellent chance for him to study the classics and quietly observe the subtleties of nature. Both men experience the same misfortune, but one man lost himself because he was too attached to the experience of loss, while the other found himself because he was able to let go of gain and loss.

A healing heart has no time frame.

The greatest loss lies in our inability to accept loss.

We ought to, as human beings, have the courage to seek a collective __ruth_ that benefits our species the most, and to accept that all of our doctrines and beliefs may just be incomplete. That we don__ know it all and that perhaps we never will. That others like us may have something to teach us, and we may have something to contribute to their communities. That communities, types of people, are divisions we__e created for ourselves. That for all of what we know, the knowledge and wisdom that we have gathered in the few millennia may be a small fraction of what is there to be discovered, understood and applied.

When it comes to love and loss, acceptance is never easy. We can't make someone see all we have to give, make them love us, or make them change. All we can do is move on and stop wasting time.

Forgiveness wasn__ ever easy, but a feat much more manageable when you weren__ the subject of its grace. Maybe I__ always be a broken recipient of grace. And in that musing, I found rest.

Home is

We can only forgive the world to the extent that we forgive ourselves for being in it.

Love moves in sync with the cadence of forgiveness, sings in tune with the melody of acceptance, and dances in rhythm with the music of companionship.

Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance.

We would be in each other's lives again. No, he hadn't been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he'd disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.

All beings are vast multidimensional masters. They may be exploring divinity or limitation, but they are masters nonetheless. Then it becomes ok to simply allow them their process.

You know, sometimes it's nice to just have someone to blame, even if it has to be yourself, even if it doesn't make sense.

To love those who love us and are good to us is easy. To love those who are indifferent to us is workable, but to love those who have harmed us, intentionally or not, is true growth and realization.

We suffer but little from suffering itself; but from the manner wherein we accept it overwhelming sorrow may spring. We are wrong in believing that it comes from without. For indeed we create it within us, out of our very substance.