Despite Everything, Life Is Full Of Beauty

By 'coming To Terms With Life' I Mean: The Reality Of Death Has Become A Definite Part Of My Life; My Life Has, So To Speak, Been Extended By Death, By My Looking Death In The Eye And Accepting It, By Accepting Destruction As Part Of Life And No Longer Wasting My Energies On Fear Of Death Or The Refusal To Acknowledge Its Inevitability. It Sounds Paradoxical: By Excluding Death From Our Life We Cannot Live A Full Life, And By Admitting Death Into Our Life We Enlarge And Enrich It.

And I Believe That I Will Never Be Able To Hate Any Human Being For His So-called 'wickedness,' That I Shall Only Hate The Evil That Is Within Me, Though Hate Is Perhaps Putting It Too Strongly Even Then. In Any Case, We Cannot Be Lax Enough In What We Demand Of Others And Strict Enough In What We Demand Of Ourselves.

A Desire To Kneel Down Sometimes Pulses Through My Body, Or Rather It Is As If My Body Has Been Meant And Made For The Act Of Kneeling. Sometimes, In Moments Of Deep Gratitude, Kneeling Down Becomes An Overwhelming Urge, Head Deeply Bowed, Hands Before My Face.

I Feel Like A Small Battlefield In Which The Problems, Or Some Of The Problems, Of Our Time Are Being Fought Out. All One Can Hope To Do Is Keep Oneself Humbly Available, To Allow Oneself To Be A Battlefield. After All, The Problems Must Be Accommodated, Have Somewhere To Struggle And Come To Rest And We, Poor Little Humans, Must Put Our Inner Space At Their Service And Not Run Away.

Sometimes My Day Is Crammed Full Of People And Talk And Yet I Have The Feeling Of Living In Utter Peace And Quiet. And The Tree Outside My Window, In The Evenings, Is A Greater Experience Than All Those People Put Together.