Night deepens toward its nadir, just as winter toward its coldest point. The body sleeps but the spirit is waking, as though through eyelids closed, still a subtler eye is watching. My cats have curled to sleep on my bed, caressing each other as they wash, then bundling themselves together for their rest. And around the wide world, people fall into slumber in the wake of the waning light, as though the shadow of the earth, like the soft hand of death, brushed each one gently into short oblivion, to be called to rise again by morning’s light.
I have no illness, yet my head is aching. It is as though tears that have not been shed have gathered like the river behind a dam. Or perhaps, in ache, an idea asks to be acknowledged. The words form themselves in my heart, then rise to my head that they might be heard: it is now that they need comfort.
No human born is exempt from that intention, nor any thing living. A woman watches her son leave for war; a man watches his son return, killed, or wounded or untouched but never unharmed. Cities built upon sand convulse with an anger and a despair nourished by global greed and ignited by petrodollars. A child watches her parents move away from one another, and her heart tears apart then grows larger. A young man struggles to find his place in the world, in strength, in softness.
The body blossoms, loves, then gradually decays: the memory of beauty more painful perhaps than the reality of age. A country of action mistakes empty entertainment for happiness, being offered nothing substantial. Those is power hide their true designs even from themselves, and so mislead an entire nation.
Knowing that vicious behavior exists, its seed planted in doubts, then watered by loss and by pain so that it blooms unhindered again and again — knowing that the shadow of a flower will forever accompany the flower, so long as there is light in the sky — is why they all, we all, need comfort now. Not more of the whip. Whether man or woman, you hold the whip, and the cut of its lash will not abate until you yourself open your fingers and let the cord fall.
You say you do not wield it. But you say this only because acknowledging the pain you cause – inadvertently or because of the human limits to our skills – pain caused to those that are closest to you, is almost unbearable.
If even the judgments we lay on those we love are not admissible, how then to confirm and condemn the heinous acts we are party to around the world? Clandestine prisons whose untried inmates are tortured for truths they may not even possess. War for money’s sake, whose casualties include our humanity and our hope.
This is the face of your world and, like looking into the face of god, it may blind you. That is why we most need comfort now, as we always have. Not the superficial comfort of a sporting event, or a drink or the release of sex, but an embrace into which we can soften, the cool swallow of water that replenishes our body, the comfort of repairing in daylight what we humans have wasted during the night.
And comforts exist. Each act of caring for the self is an act of caring for the Body. And every manner of compassion for the self allows one to more easily recognize the strokes of our own discomfort we lay against the world, to be received by humans and creatures alike. Recognize anger to sow love. Recognize anger, and sow love.
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