Winter 2024

It sometimes makes me feel so sick and broken to experience amazing beauty and peace during deep despair. Is the world getting better? Has it ever been? Lately it’s all I can think about. In the quietest moments and the times I experience such gratitude — pure happiness; a long gazing smile at beauty that I can hold in my own hand. And then for a split second, sickness washes over me and the object of my loving gaze!! I’m not ashamed to feel happy or safe, but the moment does spoil something in me — the part that knows about the whole premise. The part of me that is familiar with the premise has to ask: does the good outweigh the bad, really? Where can I go to find that the relationship between orchestrated suffering and occurrences of amazing goodness isn’t just dissonance? Where do the good and the bad do a complex dance, become intertwined in a way that tells me: this is the nature of humanity, this is us moving imperfectly in the right direction.

When I wake up in the morning to cuddle my warm cutie little 12lb puppy, and Samuel sets my coffee down next to my lamp, I might wonder, “Could it be better than this right now?” And this is permissible because life really does fill me up and that’s what I’d wish for everyone. I could eat almost any meal for dinner tonight. We could dance and hold tiny ornate things between our fingers but this doesn’t make the world good, it makes my world good.

Not all good is that way, though. Some is brave and does make the world better for at least the moment you witness it, or it might even change everything about the world of one person.

Will pain be forever? Why can’t we share it some other way? The chance nature of my joy burdens me sometimes. This is not an easy time for my mind but my body is safe.