Life is grace. Sleep is forgiveness. The night absolves. Darkness wipes the slate clean, not spotless to be sure, but clean enough for another day’s chalking.
― The Alphabet of Grace
forgiveness
Quote for Today: Desmond Tutu
Because forgiveness is like this: a room can be dank because you have closed the windows, you’ve closed the curtains. But the sun is shining outside, and the air is fresh outside. In order to get that fresh air, you have to get up and open the window and draw the curtains apart.
Image: The Open Window © siegertmarc with CCLicense
Quote for Today: Avina Celeste
Everyone, at some point in their life, is going to make a mistake, in fact, many of you probably already have. Unfortunately, there is no fix for mistakes, no going back, no changing the past. There is only moving on and forgiving yourself. Take with you the lessons from your mistakes and live well knowing that you have made the best of the situation, you have learned, you have grown. If you grow after a mistake, it is no longer a mistake but rather a helpful pointer telling you to try again a different way. Forgive yourself, you are trying your best.
Public Domain Image via the US Bureau of Land Management
Quote for Today: Harold Kushner
In the final analysis, the question of why bad things happen to good people translates itself into some very different questions, no longer asking why something happened, but asking how we will respond, what we intend to do now that it has happened.
Are you capable of forgiving and accepting in love a world which has disappointed you by not being perfect, a world in which there is so much unfairness and cruelty, disease and crime, earthquake and accident? Can you forgive its imperfections and love it because it is capable of containing great beauty and goodness, and because it is the only world we have?
Are you capable of forgiving and loving the people around you, even if they have hurt you and let you down by not being perfect? Can you forgive them and love them, because there aren’t any perfect people around, and because the penalty for not being able to love imperfect people is condemning oneself to loneliness?
—Harold Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People
Public Domain Image via MaxPixel.com
Quote for Today: Oli Anderson
The first step to empathy and compassion is realising the similarities between yourself and those that are suffering; the first step to forgiveness is realising that we’re all human and we all share the same capacity for fallibility and foible; the first step to growth is to recognise the value of things that are outside your current mental frameworks so that you can grow into them.
―Oli Anderson, Personal Revolutions: A Short Course in Realness
US Ambassador joins Faisal Mosque Interfaith Prayer, Talks © US Embassy Pakistan with CCLicense
Quote for Today: David Rakoff
Is there some lesson on how to be friends?
I think what it means is that central to living
a life that is good is a life that’s forgiving.
We’re creatures of contact regardless of whether
we kiss or we wound. Still, we must come together.
Though it may spell destruction, we still ask for more–
since it beats staying dry but so lonely on shore.
So we make ourselves open while knowing full well
it’s essentially saying “please, come pierce my shell.”
Image: Karunakar Rayker with CCLicense
Quote for Today: Libba Bray
Emergence
© Katherine McDaniel
We’re each of us our own chiaroscuro, our own bit of illusion trying to emerge into something solid, something real. We’ve got to forgive ourselves that. I must remember to forgive myself. Because there’s an awful lot of gray to work with. No one can live in the light all the time.
―Libba Bray, A Great and Terrible Beauty
Through The Eyes of Betrayer and Betrayed: Fractures
Is it possible to empathize with those who have made choices that inflict pain on themselves and those around them?
© Sardaka with CCLicense
These three poems, Fractures, were written in 2012 for an operatic recital called The Other Woman. They were also part of the inspiration for an earlier blog post called Of Mud and Poetry Contests and are linked to synkroniciti even though they predate her founding. It was during the time that they were written and performed that I began to have the ideas that would become synkroniciti.
Triangles, magdalen, and Homecoming served as linking material between musical pieces arranged to reveal a desperate love triangle. To me, these poems are like tortured postcards from people who are falling apart. The difficulty was to make them stark and descriptive without being sentimental and avoiding either judgment or excuse. Words skip across the page as if they were cut from a magazine and pasted together, enhancing the feeling that the fabric of human thought has been destroyed and communication lines are fractured. All that is left are snippets of feelings, almost too painful to endure, and lifeless memories.
It has often struck me that those who develop relationships outside of proscribed limits are judged as harshly as murderers and rapists, sometimes even more so. If they inflict pain and damage on themselves and those around them, isn’t that enough without observers adding their disapproval? Some might argue that this disapproval is necessary to keep others from such behavior, but I wonder if it doesn’t just serve to make it more attractive to those who are desperate to rebel. The greatest reason to avoid any risky type of behavior should not be a fear of punishment, but a fear of inflicting pain.
These poems are an attempt to empathize with both the betrayed and the betrayer, realizing that we all carry within us our own breaking point. Perhaps this is the reason for our harshness.