Cruel Gods, World on Fire

JMW Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, detail, 1834

Cruel men believe in a cruel God and use their belief to excuse their cruelty.

— Bertrand Russell

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The antidote to despair is not to be found in the brave attempt to cheer ourselves up with happy abstracts, but in paying a profound and courageous attention to the body and the breath, independent of our imprisoning thoughts and stories, even strangely, in paying attention to despair itself, and the way we hold it, and which we realize, was never ours to own and to hold in the first place. To see and experience despair fully in our body is to begin to see it as a necessary, seasonal visitation, and the first step in letting it have its own life, neither holding it nor moving it on before its time.

…Refusing to despair about despair itself, we can let despair have its own natural life and take a first step onto the foundational ground of human compassion, the ability to see and understand and touch and even speak, the heartfelt grief of another.

— David Whyte

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Psychologically and spiritually, there is no such thing as a triumph by force. Domination is domination, not transformation. How you get there determines where you will finally arrive. The dominated one eventually becomes another dominator, or a sad victim, or both; all of whom are…