11-1-07

The holidays will soon be here, and I’m thinking that maybe – just maybe – this will be my last holiday season in here. That thought is exciting, overwhelming, and scary – all of that. These years in here have been like being isolated on another planet. It leaves me somewhat “out of touch” with the outside world, but more deeply “in touch” with the inner world.

The date of my release has seemed so far in the future I haven’t given much thought to it. However, as the possibility becomes more real, I’ll do a little planning, a little dreaming. The dreaming includes being able to call dear friends. What a dream that is!

I continue looking for the perfect sentence, the one that will come alive on the page and penetrate the thickest armor around the heart. My quest reminds me of something Oscar Wilde once wrote – “I was working on a proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a camera. In the afternoon, I put it back again.” (I can relate to that)

These perfect sentences aren’t always in me, though. They often hover a few feet above my head, so I stand on my toes trying to reach them. Often I grab fistfuls of air.

I find though, that if I sit here waiting for the perfect sentence to show up, I have a long wait ahead of me. Maybe it doesn’t want me to wait. Maybe the perfect sentence is tired of one-night stands with writers who can’t be trusted to stick around when the perfect sentence turns out to be not so perfect after all. Yeah! Let’s hear it for the “off the wall,” “out of the box” sentence that is free of the need to be perfect.

Recently I was reading some of the newspaper headlines that came out in the 50’s and 60’s and the ones about the Middle East were the same as they are today. And that reminds me of a story…

In Israel to cover the fighting, a young reporter decided to look for a human-interest story. In Jerusalem, she heard about an old man who’s been going to the Wailing Wall to pray, twice a day, for everyday, for a long, long time. So she went to the Wailing Wall and there he was.

“Sir”, she asked, “how long have you been coming to the Wailing Wall and praying?”

“For 50 years.”

“What do you pray for?”

“I pray for peace between the Jews and the Arabs. I pray for our children to grow up in safety and friendship.”

“How do you feel after 50 years?”

“Like I’m talking to a wall.”

The unending search for peace in the Middle East or in other parts of the world reminds us that if we really want to bring peace to the world, we need to love ourselves: to know that we are loved, to discover that our nature is love and to feel the joy and beauty of that. Then the separate, alienated sense of self starts to soften, and we can no longer have any motivation or impulse to go to war. Thus, real lasting peace can only come about through prayer and meditation, simple acts of kindness, and through each of us being a loving presence.

It all comes down to bring a loving presence, doesn’t it? The negative happenings have only one purpose: to foster compassion in the human heart. Anything can fuel the fires of compassion if our hearts are open wide enough. All of us,in our own way, just by being more tender and loving, can open our hearts and make a difference in someone’s life.

If we don’t know how to deal with a difficult person or situation, let’s just love. Everything else is just a finger in the dike, holding back an ocean that, ironically, we could happily drown in. Sometimes, I think trying to get it through my own thick seawall of a skull, that compassion means onl this:

When in Doubt, Just Love!