We have crawled through the past 2 plus years tattered, languished, grieving, disconsolate, shaken and hopefully stronger. For those that have lost loved ones, family, jobs, businesses, homes and school, I send love, compassion and empathy. Now we move forward and everything has changed. Priorities have changed. Business as usual has changed or closed. This is an opportunity to reconsider our place in this world and personal goals. Perhaps the silver lining.
"Those who attempt to act and do things for others or for the world without deepening their own self-understanding, freedom, integrity and capacity to love, will not have anything to give others.
"They will communicate nothing but the contagion of their own obsessions, their aggressiveness, their ego-centered ambitions, their delusions about ends and means, their doctrinaire prejudices and ideas.
"We are living through the greatest crisis in the history of humanity; and this crisis is centered precisely in the country that has made a fetish out of action and has lost (or perhaps never had) the sense of contemplation. Far from being irrelevant, prayer, meditation and contemplation are of the utmost importance in America."
—Thomas Merton
