Number Eighteen

The violence goes on.  Taking our children.  All over the world.  For profit, for revenge, for a rite of passage.  For belief, or in the name of god.  It is made from the myth of belonging and not belonging.  Of family vs. strangers; of the good people and the different ones.  The different ones are specters of evil.  The different ones can be killed.  Driven.  Used.  They die invisibly.  They make up the nightly body count, each demise a measure of success.

The violence goes on -- as if we were not all part of "the whole."  As if we were not here learning to love.  As if killers would not have to learn to be victims.  It is passed on, our violence merely deepening the amnesia.  Helping to forget what's all around: The sound, like a constant wind, of souls trying to be heard.

Number Seventeen

The act of judgment makes us dense, breakable.  The soul can only sustain damage by hardening, by inventing good and bad, by separating what is seen and felt and done into the great lie of right and wrong.  The act of judgment compresses love into a thin approval.  Ready to be torn, taken.  Ready to be withheld or returned again for a ransome.

Judgment collapses us with the weight of fragments, the breaking of experience into what is accepted or not accepted.  Loved or thrown away.  The walls of the self fall inward because judgment always descends there.  Scavenging.  Pressing.  Digging into our last protected place.

Number Sixteen

We say "the die is cast" or "it's god's will" as if Fate were certain.  As if we were helpless at the intersecting lines of cause and effect. And then we build religions on assumptions of will and sin and earned redemption.  As if choice were absolute and the events of our lives were our own creation.  We believe in belief, as if something held strongly will manifest itself -- in this reality or (in Quantum Physics) a parallel one.

Morality depends on will.  Justice depends on will.  Without will there is no right and wrong. There is no right and wrong because will depends on awareness and the strength to resist pain.  Which varies from moment to moment, from soul to soul, from situation to situation.

There is no right and wrong because the matrices of cause stack up -- like waves -- from ripple to tsunami.  And the strength of will that can surmount the lapping tide falters before the rushing mountain.

We come here to face choices.  We have a ticket to learn.  Free will flickers -- here for a moment and then gone.  The lens of awareness goes from clarity to utter blindness.  Yet we keep on: responding, failing, moving.  What lessons are made of.