In her book, 'Small Wonder,' Barbara Kingsolver writes -
The closest my heart has come to breaking lately was on the day my little girl arrived home from school and ran to me, her face tense with expectation, asking, "Are they still having that war in Afghanistan?"
I suppose there are a lot of things that may break our heart. The passing of a loved one, the absence of a friend, the hopes and fears that turn into dashed dreams and the reality finally happening: something we had greatly feared actually happens.
"As if," she continues, "the world were such a place that in one afternoon. while kindergartners were working hard to master the letter I, it would decide to lay down its arms..."
Said her daughter: "If people are just going to keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born."
Kingsolver writes that she "sat on the floor and held her tightly to keep my own spirit from draining through the soles of my feet . . ."
And she continues: "It used to be, on many days, that I could close my eyes and sense myself to be perfectly happy. I have wondered lately if that feeling will ever come back. It's a worthy thing to wonder, but maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe . . . the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, 'twixt two extremes of passion - joy and grief,' as Shakespeare put it."
One tries to keep balanced, or get balanced, tries to keep keeping on, to make sense when there's little sense - only mystery and more mystery, beyond any possible explanation; and when there is mostly silence when one tries to pray, or when one hopes a voice may respond to one's attempts at meaningful - even simple, basic conversation.
The closest my heart has come to breaking lately was on the day my little girl arrived home from school and ran to me, her face tense with expectation, asking, "Are they still having that war in Afghanistan?"
I suppose there are a lot of things that may break our heart. The passing of a loved one, the absence of a friend, the hopes and fears that turn into dashed dreams and the reality finally happening: something we had greatly feared actually happens.
"As if," she continues, "the world were such a place that in one afternoon. while kindergartners were working hard to master the letter I, it would decide to lay down its arms..."
Said her daughter: "If people are just going to keep doing that, I wish I'd never been born."
Kingsolver writes that she "sat on the floor and held her tightly to keep my own spirit from draining through the soles of my feet . . ."
And she continues: "It used to be, on many days, that I could close my eyes and sense myself to be perfectly happy. I have wondered lately if that feeling will ever come back. It's a worthy thing to wonder, but maybe being perfectly happy is not really the point. Maybe . . . the truer measure of humanity is the distance we must travel in our lives, time and again, 'twixt two extremes of passion - joy and grief,' as Shakespeare put it."
One tries to keep balanced, or get balanced, tries to keep keeping on, to make sense when there's little sense - only mystery and more mystery, beyond any possible explanation; and when there is mostly silence when one tries to pray, or when one hopes a voice may respond to one's attempts at meaningful - even simple, basic conversation.
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