Perhaps you grew up hating
whites or blacks, Asians, Latinos,
Christians, Jew, Muslims, or Buddhists,
young or old, men or women,
fat or thin, rich or poor.
Or maybe hate grew later in your life,
metastasized while you were looking
for someone or something to blame
for your fear, or the gnawing hunger
in your belly or your mind.
Maybe you hate the Germans for their crimes,
or the Japanese, the Americans, the Turks,
Russians, Serbians, the Chinese, Palestinians, Israelis,
the Dutch, Spaniards, Portuguese--you see
the list of crimes and criminals is endless.
If you think about where we come from,
perhaps you believe in a God, or many gods
that created everything,
and everyone a part of him or her or them;
what do I know? Or maybe you believe we evolved
from one thing to another until finally becoming human
in Africa--yes, all starting out
the same color from the same place.
Some say we were seeded from another place--
Sirius, the Dog Star, or the Pleiades--but even then
take it back and we are all the stuff of stars.
Take it back to the beginning of us,
then take it back to the beginning of life
in all forms--animal, plant, mineral--
then take it back to the beginning of light.
In every stage along the way,
from the Big Bang to the present,
two things emerge
as evident of the process of life:
One is the vast diversity of form;
and the other is the oneness we come from
that always was and always will be.
And the universal language
that bridges the infinitesimal gap
between diversity and oneness
is compassion--the ability to see yourself in the other
and to enfold or take in with caring--
the antithesis of hate,
which is love.
This time is not a mistake
or an aberration. It is the culmination
of our struggle, our story evolving
out of separate, of us and them,
breaking away from our fate
and opening our hearts and minds
to our destiny. Our task
is to love what hates,
to understand it in ourselves
and others, and to invite it in
from the cold, dark place where it's been hiding.
This was always the task,
to invite our shadow into the light, to breathe in
the possibilities or our divinity.
Prepare to be inspired.
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