In Response to Self Help and War

You do not have to love yourself, others, or life. Nor do you have to hate. You can venture past those drawn lines and see more than that map allows.

You can look beyond the calm, crystal blue waters of love, and the raging, stormy waves of hate, and see that there is something else. There is grace.

There is recognizing that the journey of life can be so beautiful and amazing and confusing and cruel, that to ask the self to reconcile it all and do something sensible with it is asking too much.

There is knowing that while you may feel unable to understand any of it, you have the capacity to sit with all of it. And that is the chair in which grace resides.