Number Ninety Seven

In the place we gather after each life, no one is missing.  Through the long night of an incarnation, we look for each other.  We enter and leave each other's lives in ways that were foreseen and arranged.

When the play is finished, we go home.  We take what we have learned back to "the whole," back to the light.  We greet the one who was our brother in one life, and a father, daughter, friend in others.  We greet a lover who left early, and in another play survived us.

When the play is finished, we enter the circle of those who taught us, learned from us, fought for us, killed us.

Number Ninety Six

Pain is a path to truth.  It refracts light to reveal things not otherwise seen.  Pain reveals the invisible ties, the vast network of energy that connects everything.  In the heart of pain and loss is love.  By running from pain, we run from love.  By avoiding pain, we lose the pathways to connection.  In the heart of pain is a moment when the universe -- and our place within it -- finally becomes visible.

Number Ninety Five

Beauty has one purpose: to dissolve whatever holds us separate -- from each other, from every fractured rock that makes the earth, from every star in the sky. Beauty is the breath that joins us. Beauty is the dream -- in this dark sleep -- of a place where every rock, every planet, every star, every soul collides to make the next, more true and perfect version of itself.

Number Ninety Four

Joy teaches as much as pain.  Joy -- the passionate living of this moment -- is the window through which can be glipsed a soul's essence; a soul's purpose.

Joy is not bought, and there is no price to pay later.  Joy is not found; it is entered as one enters the moment.  It is held as one holds a child.

Joy is a path made of the now that leads to a center -- a center that always holds, always is there, always tells the truth.

Number Ninety Three

We especially must love our flaws. But loving the flaw is not living the flaw.  Loving the impulse to hurt isn't the act of hurting. What we do matters.  It is how we love everything outside ourselves. Choosing to be kind -- when everything inside demands cruelty -- is an act of love toward another.  Accepting the desire to be cruel is an act of love toward the self.

Number Ninety Two

Each incarnation requires the soul to struggle with a key flaw -- addiction, shame, fear, hubris, narcissism -- which in fact is a gift. It is the illness we have chosen, the work we have selected to do.  The flaw both drives us to catastrophe, and lights a path toward the learning we came here for.

Our virtues, which we celebrate, and weave into our identity, are less important than the flaw.  Our virtues are the toolbox we were given for this struggle.  And it's the struggle that matters above all.

Number Ninety One

The lessons of loss begin early.  A child's favorite toy is left somewhere and never found.  A parent turns angry or disappears, striking at a child's feelings of safety or worth.  Over time the losses mount -- people, places, things that were loved -- sometimes losing even faith or trust or sense of self.

There is nothing we have that can't be taken away.

The lesson of loss is not surrender, not detachment.  It is not to prepare for the worst, not to numb or rid the self of desire.  The lesson of loss is a more perfect form of love; a love that requires nothing, that depends on nothing -- not even the presence of the beloved.

The lesson is to love the essence and not the object.  The object can be lost, changed, eroded by time.  The essence exists always in consciousness -- outside of space and time -- and is the true, immutable core of what and who we love.

Loss leads to a form of love that is unchanged by fading beauty or scars of time; a love that is unchanged even by destruction, by absence or death. Loss teaches how, eternally, we hold the beloved.