“The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”  – Rumi

Everywhere I go or look, I sense and see and feel the need for healing. Almost everyone is hurting in one way or another. Our culture pays so much more attention to the stock market than the well being and peace of mind of people.

There is a rumor out there that the strong can heal and move past their grief and loneliness.

I’ve learned in my own life to surrender to the flow of life,  every time to fight it or push back at it, it simply overwhelms me, sometimes to a feeling of drowning.

Whoever created us gave us the awful ability to understand our own death, and to feel grief and loss in a particular and piercing way. The more I try to avoid suffering, the more I suffer because small and insignificant things start to torture and gnaw at me.

The more I fear being hurt, the more I hurt. I suffer the most when I think I can avoid suffering or try.

My highest ambition, at long last, is to be what I already am.

When I learn to accept myself fully, and if I accept myself completely and for the best reasons, then I will have met or surpassed my greatest expectations.

I am never shocked by loss, death, sickness, disappointment, or fear. To be shocked by these things is to be shocked by life itself. Who gave us the idea that our lives would be free of pain?

Suffering is how we open up, empathize, connect to one another, are given the chance to be human, and find our communities.

This is a year of fear and disruption, in a sense, everyone I know is looking to heal, searching for the firm ground on which to walk It will come, that’s human nature we were not built to live in perpetual conflict and anger.

History is clear about this, we face periods of danger and turmoil, followed by periods of peace and calm.

We don’t will this to happen, it is the nature of humans to move from one to the other.

Thomas Merton wrote that anxiety is the mark of spiritual insecurity. “If we are to live,” he wrote, “we must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.”