But I can try.
Echoes and crashes, darkness and shadows. We're all blind, helpless things struggling along dank, abandoned hospital floors. A building for the damned, that's what this life feels like sometimes. With rusted tools and useless medicines lining derelict, dust-choked cabinets and empty rooms. All of the healing machines of any value long ago carted off to some other place where the patients seemed worth fighting for. There was never any hope for us anyway. Even when personages of knowledge walked these halls we were the abandoned, the inoperable, the terminal. They would close their eyes, shake their heads, maybe give a comforting weight to the bony shoulder, and turn away. Now here we are, shifting wraiths of pain, sorrow, and anguish. Our limbs heavy, our gait shuffling we barely glance at each other as we wander. We're still searching for something, all of us for different things- hope, love, faith, escape. Yet we're trapped in this hallow building. Trapped in our lies and fears. Chained to our pride, our weak wills. So sure that someday something will change. A friend from long past will come looking to take us home, a dearly departed mother will beckon us into the beyond. No one comes. No solid footfall rebounds. We are as empty as the hospital. As empty as our fate. We are damned and deserve to be damned.
This is what we cannot see: sometimes darkness reigns. Sometimes we choose a path darker than we acknowledged at first. We choose our fate. We look into the mirror and realize we've become everything we hated, we choose to love the person best suited to hurt us, we hurt irreparably the ones we love the most, we look into the black and all we see is darkness and ruin and rot.
At some point though, something shifts. We notice the lack of a lock on the door we always passed by in our haunted life. We notice the corner of a window hidden by old filing cabinets. And we find our way, dizzy and confused, slowly and painfully into the night. The walls, once so achingly familiar in their emptiness, fall away. Our silent, skeletal companions stand beside us and for once we notice them. We stare out into the night, notice its silken comfort and look up since time immemorial. "There!" hushed whispers, the first words spoken. Muscles remember their use, heavy arms and eyebrows raise, lips curve into semblances of smiles. "Stars," the mind mutters. "Yes, stars!" we slowly remember. It isn't known how long we stand in the night, in the streets of this empty world. Not so empty as we thought before, nor so cold. Stars burn in the black and we remember what it's like to forgive ourselves and to forgive each other. Memory trickles through. We remember. We remember to be human and to never condemn ourselves. Who needs hospitals when you have redemption?
Boom. Forgive yourself, forgive your foes.
"But I say unto you which hear, Love your enemies, do good to them which hate you,
Bless them that curse you, and pray for them which despitefully use you.
And unto him who smiteth thee on the cheek, offer also the other; or, in other words, it is better to offer the other, than to revile again. And him who taketh away thy cloak, forbid him not to take thy coat also.
For it is better that thou suffer thine enemy to take these things, than to contend with him. Verily I say unto you, Your heavenly Father who seeth in secret, shall bring that wicked one into judgment.
...
Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.
Judge not, and ye shall not be judged: condemn not, and ye shall not be condemned: forgive, and ye shall be forgiven:
Give, and it shall be given unto you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over, shall men give into your bosom. For with the same measure that ye mete withal it shall be measured to you again."
Luke 6: 27-30, 35-38
Awesome talk on mercy.
oh and also,
"Face down with the LA curbside endings
With the ones and zeros.
Downtown was the perfect place to hide.
The first star that I saw last night was a headlight
Of a man-made sky, but man- made never made our dreams collide,
Collide.
Here we are now with the falling sky and the rain,
We're awakening
Here we are now with our desperate youth and the pain,
We're awakening
Maybe it's called ambition, you've been talking in your sleep
About a dream, we're awakening
Last week found me living for nothing but deadlines,
With my dead beat sky but, this town doesn't look the same tonight
These dreams started singing to me out of nowhere
And in all my life I don't know that I ever felt so alive,
Alive
I want to wake up kicking and screaming
I want to wake up kicking and screaming
I want to know that my heart's still beating
It's beating,
I'm bleeding
I want to wake up kicking and screaming
I want to live like I know what I'm leaving
I want to know that my heart's still beating
It's beating... it's beating...
I'm bleeding"
"Awakening" sung by Switchfoot
And a happy picture to remind you of the awesome of the universe:
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