We can awake.

We live in an age of bad dreams, in which the scientist and engineer posses the power to give external form to the phantasms of man’s unconscious. The bright weapons that sing in the atmosphere, ready to pulverize the cities of the world, are the

dreams of giants without a center.

Their mathematical evolutions are hieratic rites devised by

shamans without belief.

One is permitted to wish their dreams had been less sordid!

Thomas Merton, Emblems of a Season of Fury

❧

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

-Naomi Shihab Nye