Everything is waiting for you

Greg Rakozy

 

Your great mistake is to act the drama

as if you were alone. As if life

were a progressive and cunning crime

with no witness to the tiny hidden

transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny

the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,

even you, at times, have felt the grand array;

the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding

out your solo voice. You must note

the way the soap dish enables you,

or the window latch grants you freedom.

Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.

The stairs are your mentor of things

to come, the doors have always been there

to frighten you and invite you,

and the tiny speaker in the phone

is your dream-ladder to divinity.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the

conversation. The kettle is singing

even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots

have left their arrogant aloofness and

seen the good in you at last. All the birds

and creatures of the world are unutterably

themselves. Everything is waiting for you.

David Whyte

Analysis: 

This poem explores the interconnectedness of life and the importance of mindfulness. It suggests that the speaker's perception of isolation is a result of their own preoccupation, rather than an objective reality. The poem encourages the reader to recognize the beauty and significance of everyday objects and experiences, and to see themselves as part of a vast and intricate web of existence.

Compared to the author's other works, this poem shares a commitment to exploring the relationship between humanity and nature, and the importance of paying attention to the present moment. However, it is less abstract and more accessible than some of his other works, using concrete imagery and straightforward language to convey its message.

In the context of the time period, the poem reflects a growing awareness of the interconnectedness of all living things and the importance of environmental stewardship. It also speaks to the human need for connection and belonging, which was particularly relevant during a time of social and political upheaval.

The wisdom of not knowing where you are going

Magnus Östberg

Trust your inner season

On trusting the cycles of your own life

You have lived long enough to know that things come and go.

Energy rises and falls. Relationships that once burned bright grow quiet. Projects that consumed you are finished and forgotten. The child you once were has vanished into the adult you became. The strength you had at twenty is not the same strength you carry now.

And yet we resist this. 

We want to hold the peak, the moment of fullness, the height of bloom. 

We want spring without autumn. 

Growth without decline. 

We want the outbreath without the inbreath, the rising tide without the falling.

We treat the low points of our lives as problems to solve, the quiet stretches as proof that we are falling behind, the fallow seasons as failures of discipline or imagination. 

We look at someone else’s spring 

from the middle of our winter and 

conclude that we are doing it wrong.

But a life is not a straight line. 

It never was. 

It is a series of turns, of risings and settlings, of expansions that reach their furthest point and then, without anyone deciding it, come home.

Watch a garden through the year: in spring, everything pushes upward. Green shoots breaking through the soil, buds swelling on branches, life insisting on itself with a kind of urgency that borders on recklessness. Summer arrives and the garden is full, lush, heavy with fruit and flower. Then, almost imperceptibly, the turn begins. Leaves yellow. Stems dry. Petals fall. By late autumn, the garden looks like a place abandoned.

But it is not abandoned. 

Beneath the surface, roots are deepening. 

Seeds are settling into the earth. 

The garden is not dying. 

It is gathering its energy back toward the center, toward the source, toward the quiet place from which it will rise again.

Every living thing does this. Every breath does this. Every heartbeat, expansion then contraction. Outward then inward. Flourishing then returning.

Lao Tzu saw this rhythm everywhere. 

In Chapter 16 of the Tao Te Ching, he watches the ten thousand beings rise and fall, bloom and withdraw, and he names this movement the most fundamental in all of existence: 

“After having been in a flourishing state, each of them returns to its origin. 

To return to one’s origin is called being at rest. 

Being at rest is called returning to life.”

This is the great surprise. 

We might expect the return to be called death, or ending, or dissolution. 

Instead, Lao Tzu calls it returning to life. 

As if true life is not the outward flourishing but the inward homecoming. 

As if the root is more alive than the flower.

I explored this passage in depth, and what struck me most was how directly it 

speaks to the seasons we go through as human beings, not just the seasons of the year, but the seasons of a single life, a single relationship, a single project, a single day.

The seasons inside us

We all carry an inner calendar, and it rarely matches the one on the wall.

You can be in the dead of personal winter while everyone around you celebrates. 

You can feel the first stirrings of spring in the middle of November. 

You can be in full summer, producing, creating, pouring yourself into the world, while the person next to you has entered a long autumn of letting go.

Our culture has this deep bias toward ascent: 

We celebrate growth, expansion, productivity, progress. 

We have built entire industries around the promise of perpetual upward movement, and we have internalized this promise so completely that any descent feels like a personal failing.

When energy drops, we reach for caffeine or motivation or a new goal. 

When a relationship enters its quiet season, we wonder if we have fallen out of love. 

When creative inspiration fades, we diagnose ourselves with burnout or block, as if the absence of production were a disease requiring treatment.

But the descent is not a disease. It is half the cycle. 

And a cycle that only goes up is not a cycle at all. 

It is an escalation, and escalations, by their nature, eventually break.

I wrote recently about discernment, about learning to tell the difference between what we desire and what we genuinely need. The same discernment applies here. 

When you are in a fallow season, the question is not 

“how do I get out of this?” 

The question is 

“what is this season asking of me?”

Sometimes the answer is rest. 

Sometimes it is grief. 

Sometimes it is a patience so radical it feels like doing nothing at all.

And sometimes, the answer is simply: be here. 

Stop reaching for the next season. 

Let this one do its work.

The wisdom of not knowing where you are going

You do not need to know what comes next.

You do not need to be in a different season than the one you are in. 

You do not need to match anyone else’s rhythm, anyone else’s timeline, anyone else’s idea of where you should be by now.

You only need to ask, honestly and without judgment: 

What is this season? And can I let it be the season it is?

Because every season carries its own intelligence. 

Every phase of the cycle knows what it is doing, even when we do not. 

And the more we resist, the longer the season lasts. 

The more we fight the winter, the further we push the spring.

There is a particular kind of courage required to be in the middle of a cycle without knowing where it leads.

We are comfortable with beginnings, they carry the energy of promise, and we are comfortable with completions, they carry the satisfaction of arrival. 

But the middle is harder. 

The long stretch of winter where nothing seems to move. The plateau after an initial burst of growth. The quiet years of a relationship that has outgrown its early fire but has not yet discovered what it will become.

Zhuangzi tells of a tree so gnarled and twisted that no carpenter would touch it. 

It was useless, by every measure of productivity. And because it was useless, it survived. It grew old. It provided shade for generations. 

Its very refusal to be useful was what allowed it to fulfill its deepest nature.

There is a teaching in this for the seasons we cannot explain. 

The periods of our lives that do not look like progress, that produce no visible results, that would make a terrible social media post. 

These seasons may be doing the most important work of all, if we can resist the urge to rush past them.

I explored a version of this in a recent essay on staying human in noisy times, where I described how the world close to us, the kitchen, the table, the breath, is not a distraction from the real world but the ground of it. 

The same is true of the quiet seasons. 

They are not detours from your real life. 

They are the soil in which your real life takes root.

Everything returns

The Tao Te Ching promises this, and every living thing confirms it: 

What goes out comes back. What falls will rise. What empties will fill again.

Not in the same form. 

Not on your schedule. 

Not in the way you imagined.

But it returns.

The woman who lost her creative fire and thought it was gone forever sits down one evening, for no reason she can name, and writes a sentence that surprises her. 

The friendship that went quiet for two years finds its voice again over a meal neither person planned. The body that failed and frightened you learns a new way to carry you, different from before, perhaps slower, but still here, still yours.

I wrote about appreciation recently, about the practice of seeing what is already present. 

The cycles teach us something similar, but across time rather than across space. 

They teach us that what disappears is not always lost. 

That absence is sometimes the necessary prelude to a deeper presence. 

That the seed is not less alive than the flower. It is simply alive in a way we cannot see.

And perhaps that is the deepest invitation of the cycles:

To trust what we cannot see.

To let the descent be as sacred as the climb.

in, Words of Taoism

Zionism is a settler colonialist project called Jewish Colonial Trust

 

For decades Israel pretended to be an innocent country established after the horrors of the holocaust for the protection of the Jews. 

Turns out, it was all a lie. 

The zionist project is much older and has little to do with the wishes of the Jews when it was established. 

Inherently a christian doctrine, Zionism was always a plan to resettle the jews of Europe even against their will and to dominate West Asia in the process. 

Today, prof. Jeffrey Sachs and prof. Yakov Rabkin are discussing the past and the future of a racist settler-colonial political project that has become so violent in the past decade that the entire world now sees it for what it is. 

An irredeemable political fascism.

The Zionist leaders, most famously Herzel, were nationalist and secular. 

They were propounding at that stage a nationalist cause that each nation to protect itself had to have its nation state. That was the idea of nationalism.

American ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabe, said a few weeks ago just before the current war of aggression of Israel and the US that, Israel owns all the land, has the right to all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates. Based on that there's a a sense that in our world Israel should has the right to all of this land.

Israel's acting on that because part of the Israeli government is Jewish biblical Zionism, now which was not the Zionism of a 100red years ago.

The rabbis said no.

They say that Tora says: 

Live where you are, obey God's commandments, behave. 

So this Zionist movement was not what it is portrayed today as the great cause of the Jewish people. 

Anti-semites want to get rid of the Jews wherever they happen to live, and Zionists want to bring them to Palestine.

Their interests combine and it's not a coincidence that during the 1930s in Germany Zionist established very much a cooperation with the Nazi authorities who wanted to get rid of the Jews and the Zionists were trying to show that Palestine was a good place for Jews to go. 

There was an episode which I think is very important as an Israeli film called Flat and it shows well it's the story is about a SS official in 1935 visiting Palestine in the company of the chairman of the Zionist Federation of Germany and writing wonderful articles in the SS newspaper and on the occasion of that visit a medal was coined with a swastika on one side and the Zionist symbol of the six shaped star on the other. 

So it's part of history. We have a lot of evidence.

If 100 years ago someone said to a Jew you don't belong here you belong to Israel, he would be considered anti-semite. Today, for some strange reason, when someone says well I have nothing to do with Israel I'm American, oh no you're anti-semitic you're denying the right of Jewish people for self-determination.

So you have a very interesting inversion of what anti-semitism is. 

There are 50 million Zionists in the United States.

There are 15 million Jews.

John Mirshimer wrote this very important book about the Jewish lobby.

Who is actually lobbying for Israel? 

The American political system it's an incredibly corrupted system.

Big money, big influence.

What is this Israel Lobby or the Zionist lobby? 

It's it is a actually a mix of a number of things. 

Partly, it's directly the penetration of Israel into US politics because there's a lot of Israeli money and effort. 

Epstein was a Mossad agent, for example, and was definitely an Israeli asset operating in the United States.

And the evidence for that, by the way, is not only the circumstantial evidence that Ahood Barack, who had been the head of military intelligence, was his big buddy, but the fact that Epstein was representing himself all over the world as making deals on behalf of Israel. And if he was freelancing, the Israelis would have stopped him. Believe me, they didn't stop him. So the fact is he was operating at someone's behest.

That's an example of direct Israel influence. 

Then there's big Jewish money and there definitely are Jews that are Zionists and there definitely are billionaires Jews that are Zionists and they put a lot of money into this.

Miriam Naden, who is the widow of Sheldon Adlesen, a big casino magnate, she definitely has influence. It's hundreds of millions of dollars given to Trump. 

Ted Cruz puts influential people into the National Security Council and elsewhere that are basically some are even dual citizens literally Israeli citizens and US citizens handling the Middle East portfolio in the US government. So the US is a very porous politics. It's completely interest group sold to the highest bidder.

Zionism has been moving from the stentatious left because it used to be very socialist, and in the last decades turned to fascist right.

And this has nothing to do with the personalities involved. 

Is a very natural evolution of a political movement which is based on discrimination on ethnic nationalism.

And here it's important to distinguish between ethnic nationalism and civic nationalism because in the system of ethnic nationalism just like in anti-semitism you cannot change your characteristics.

In other words either you belong or you don't belong you cannot change it. 

The violence that we've observed in the Middle East in West Asia for the last 80 years is largely connected with Zionism. Because you have to control the population that is naturally unhappy. You displace it, you exile it, you discriminate, you now submit it to genocide.

Of course, they're not going to be happy. Of course, there will be resistance.

But this resistance is not considered by Israel as legitimate and as logical in a way. 

But they tried to dress it as anti-semitism.

The higher the income of the Jew the more Zionist he's likely to be.

So the evolution of Zionism in the direction of fascism is perfectly predictable and I would say that it certainly is not Bib Natanyao or Smriidge or Beng also very much mentioned in among those who say well how horrible these people are taking Israel in the wrong direction. 

I wouldn't say so. 

I say that they represent their embody that trend towards fascism which had been there from the beginning and then maybe we have to be mindful of time. 

The clean great doctrine says that Greater Israel will control all of Palestine. 

There will never be a Palestinian state. 

But more importantly, even that in response to resistance movements like Hamas or Hezbollah or others, Israel's response will be to overthrow the governments in the Middle East that support those resistance movements. That's Netanyahu's insight.

Don't fight the resistance, fight the governments that back them. 

So, Israel has been on a war spree since 1996.

Wesley Clark famously told us about the seven wars that the US would fight.

These are basically US-Israel wars.

And that list included Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, and Iran. 

And here we are.

So this is the logical effect. 

Also, you abuse your colonial settler. You push aside the local population. There's resistance. That resistance has its allies regionally and you end up in regional war. 

And this is the disaster that we're in.

It's important to distinguish between Zionism is a political movement and Jews and Judaism which may be religion or ethnic group whichever way you want to put it because this confusion really serves Israel and Zionism.

Israeli leaders whether they were socialists like Shimon Perez or fascists like Benjamin Netanyahu or anyone else who would come later, will convince you that Israel represents the entire Jewish people and for Israel it's a source of legitimacy. 

For Jews it's a source of shame and insecurity so it's very important to see that Israel not only hasn't brought security to the Jews, that's what the Zionist movement was promising. 

In fact, the most insecure place for a Jew to live today, is Israel.

Strangely enough, not in Tehran because Jews there don't identify with Israel and are very well integrated and accepted. And the anti-zionist government of Iran knows very well how to distinguish between Jews and Zionism.

Ghazal

Esra Tekin

There is no desire to speak again; whom to ask, what to say?

I, who was treated ill, what should I not read, what not to say?

What should I tell that honey for me is like poison!

I cry; the fist of the cruel! It teases. Would I not say?

There is no one who knows my affliction, none I trust;

For what should I cry, laugh, die, and live today?

I and this faith; the grief of my failure, and this wishfulness;

I cannot do anything; and the words of affection, if only I could say.

O my heart, there was spring and there was this season of comfort.

But I cannot fly anymore. I want to know to whom should I say ...

Though I am quiet and cannot remember any song,

Yet all the time, something stirs in my heart that I should say.

Ah, remember the good day when this cage was broken;

That loneliness is gone, my delight, I sing the cares away.

I am a frail stick that trembles in air each time;

An Afghan daughter who can say wherever she needs to say.

It is night and these words come to me

By the call of my voice words come to me

What fire blazes in me, what water do I get?

From my body, the fragrance of my soul comes to me

I do not know from where these great words come

The fresh breeze takes loneliness away from me

That from the clouds of light comes this light

That there is no other wish that comes to me

The cry of my heart sparkles like a star

And the bird of my flight touches the sky

My madness can be found in his book

O do not say no, my master, O look once at me

It is like the day of judgment

Like doomsday my silence comes at me

I am happy that the giver gives me silk

And all night, all along these verses come to me

Nadia Anjuman

Stephen Kapos – an 88-year-old British-Hungarian Holocaust survivor

 

In this conversation, Mehdi Hasan sits down with Stephen Kapos – an 88-year-old British-Hungarian Holocaust survivor, who was forced to go into hiding at the age of seven, was separated from his mother and father, lost 15 members of his family to the Nazi concentration camps, and witnessed the total destruction of cities during the war. 

Today, Kapos has become one of the most vocal pro-Palestinian voices among Jewish Holocaust survivors.

Mehdi also asks Kapos about those who have cited similarities between, Donald Trump’s fascistic leadership in the US and the leadership of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel and Nazi Germany in the 1920s and 30s. 

Kapos says it’s “absolutely” a fair comparison.

Watch the full interview where the two discuss 

Kapos’ experience as a Jewish, pro-Palestine activist, his rejection of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, and why he will continue to fight for the children of Gaza.

Rabbi Elhanan Beck

 

Rabbi Elhanan Beck delivers one of the most striking critiques of Zionism and the current Israeli-US wars in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran, you'll hear. 

He argues that, according to the Torah, the state of Israel has no right to exist, and goes further—describing Benjamin Netanyahu as “Amalek,” a force that pulls people away from God.

The Rabbi also claims that if necessary, Israel would use nuclear weapons and that “no price is too high,” even suggesting they would kill millions to secure their goals.

We explore the theology behind these views, including the Messiah, the Temple, and the idea of Greater Israel - alongside his belief in Jewish-Muslim coexistence.

Palestinian journalist Ahmed al-Naouq

 

‘Our problem is not with the Jewish people it’s with occupiers’ 

says Ahmed al-Naouq to Piers Morgan

During an appearance on Piers Morgan Uncensored, Palestinian journalist Ahmed al-Naouq pushed back against Morgan’s claim that 

“Hamas wanted to kill as many Jewish people as they can” on 7 October.

Al-Naouq argued that neither Hamas nor the Palestinian people have an issue with Jewish people, but rather with Israelis.

“This is not a religious war. 

This is a war between colonisation and the colonised — occupiers and the occupied,” he said.

Nazm

Vladimir Polikarpov

O the one who hides in the mountain of unfamiliarity!

O you that sleep in the quietness of the pearl.

O who remains in the memories!

Bring the memories of transparent water.

In a river like forgetfulness, my mind is full of dust.

The voice that comes from the mountain makes me think

That from the one who destroys, how can you get your golden string?

That the storm of cruelty affects the faith.

How can you get the comfort of a moon from a silver leaf?

There is no death after this!

If the river stops to flow,

And if the clouds open a way to your heart,

And yes, if the daughter of the moon blesses you with her smiles.

If the mountains become soft, greenery grows,

Fruit grows.

And one was kind, from all the unkind.

Will the sun rise?

Will the memories rise with it too?

Those memories that are hidden from our eyes

And while frightened from the flood and the rain of cruelness

Will the light of hope appear?

Nadia Anjuman

Abby Martin Went To Israel. IT'S WORSE Than You Think

 

The whole world has to isolate this rogue, apartheid, genocidal maniac, serial killing, pathologically lying state. Isolate it. Shame anyone who goes there. Academics, celebrities, politicians, and they've been exposed for what they are. 

And Zionism is on its last leg. It only exists by the weight of its propaganda. And that propaganda is collapsed entirely. The world sees Israel for what it is, and it can't last for long in its current state. You cannot expect change in a society this far gone. It is fullthroated fascist.

And that's why they act the way they do with full total impunity because they have no humanity left. This is a society far gone with protection of a military empire with hatred in their hearts. And we're seeing essentially the fourth Reich today marching forward. 

And there's no Allied forces coming to save us. The Israeli Knesset just passed a law allowing the execution of Palestinian prisoners, but not Israelis.

This is the true face of apartheid Israel. 

But this is nothing new. 

I saw this firsthand when I was in Israel back in 2016. Fullthroated fascism.

"You can't deal with these people.

There's no need to try. There's no need to talk to them. 

There's only one way. Like I would carpet bomb them. 

You would carpet bomb them?

It's the only It's the only way you could deal with it."

I didn't realize this. 

I didn't realize how viscerally, grotesquesly genocidal Israelis were, how openly fascist they would be to anyone.

"Jews shouldn't marry Arabs.

Shouldn't marry Arabs. 

Why do you feel strongly about that?

Because Jews is a special nation that God gave it to the Jews. We don't want the Arabs to be here." 

They knew that they were on camera.

That's what's so alarming to me, too. I wasn't trying to hide. I wasn't doing gotcha journalism. I was going up with a camera and saying generally what do you think about the situation?

"I think Israelis have to take over and they have to kick them away."

I was so horrified and alarmed at the genocidal rhetoric that was being espoused. Every single person for every generation, every walk of life, they wanted ethnic cleansing. They said we should nuke them. One little girl laughing. We should kill all Arabs. Kill all Arabs.

"We need to kill Arabies." [laughter]

It shows you the impunity back then. The arrogance to just assume this is what you guys think too, right? You're an American. You agree with me. You guys have been doing the same thing. This is who we are. We're proud racists. We're proudly fascist. 

I felt like I was walking into Berlin in 1932. 

I really felt absolutely disgusted. 

I just couldn't believe what I was hearing. 

I mean, just walking a couple steps and as white as I am, are you Arab? Are you Arab? And I'm like, what? I'm an American. 

Oh, good. We can talk about Arabs then. We can talk about how much we hate Palestinians. 

I saw the writing on the wall back then. I saw that there's no hope from within Israeli society. I went to rallies where they were calling to kick all the refugees out. You know, these were things that were told Israel is a safe haven for Holocaust survivors, for genocide survivors. 

Well, why are all the African refugees put out in the middle of the Negeb Desert into a concentration camp? Why don't they want any African refugees there? 

They tokenize Ethiopian refugees, but then they make them take depriva birth control because they don't want them to reproduce. 

This is the nature of Israeli society. 

It's an ethnostate and it's built on supremacy and hate because that's what Zionism is.

How many civilians have been killed in Gaza from what you know?

You have to continue to expel. 

You have to continue to kill to keep that artificial majority in place.

"If you gave me a button to just erase Gaza, every single living being in Gaza would no longer be living tomorrow. I would press it in a second. I would press it right now. Give me that button and press it right now." 

There you go.

And I think most Israelis would during the Gaza genocide to see people just proclaim out in the open the genocidal incitement.

It's an entire nation out there that is responsible.

It was heinous and horrifying, but finally people saw Israel for what it is. It's all been exposed. They're not hiding anymore.

Israel's propaganda is not working anymore because for the first time, Palestinians have been able to just show us the unvarnished truth of the reality that they endure on a daily basis. We see the settler terrorism. We see the people getting mowed down for doing nothing. We see the crimes every single day. You cannot hide genocide from us.

So, the propaganda has become cartoonish.

"I'm very puzzled by the constant concern which the world is showing for the Palestinian people and is actually showing for these horrible inhuman animals. It's inverted just everything that we know to be true. Black is white, up is down. It's the most moral army in the world. We're a benevolent empire spreading human rights and democracy."

Who the hell believes this anymore? 

So, it's become silly. It's become absurd.

The Israelis today saying that Hamas use Palestinians as human shields. 

Do they killing the victims then blaming the victims for killing themselves? 

I mean, what is this logic?

They infantilize us. They treat us like children.

This is a genocide happening in front of our eyes.

We have that word is, as you know, incredibly emotive. And the Israelis, as you know, will be saying that they are targeting Hamas only.

It's become so obvious that we're being dictated to that our reality is curated by tech overlords who are profiting off the infrastructure of genocide, of the surveillance of our lives. All of these things are interconnected. So, the propaganda doesn't work anymore. It's too infantilizing and stupid.

One day after describing it as a tragic mishap, Israel has now claimed a deadly double strike on a Gaza hospital was prompted by the discovery of a Hamas camera.

A Hamas camera is why they blow up journalists at a hospital because they have a camera that was belonged to Hamas. I mean, it just makes corporate media journalists and establishment journalists look like buffoons, doesn't it? For towing this absurd propaganda that's so hollowed out and childlike.

They should be ashamed of themselves.

We have some really disturbing new information out of Israel. 

The Israeli prime minister spokesman just confirmed. 

Babies and toddlers were found with their heads decapitated.

There's no excuse whatsoever. 

They are complicit in this. 

But you see Israel buying up media outlets. 

But we have to fight with the weapons that apply to the battlefields in which we're engaged. And the most important ones are the social media. And the most important purchase that is going on right now is class Tik Tok. Tik Tok. Number one.

Do you see Israeli billionaires trying to tamp down on the narrative? 

They're desperate. 

They're desperate because they know that's the only way they'll survive is to try to convince the world of the opposite of what we're all seeing. 

So that's why you see these desperate, pathetic influencers just spewing lies.

I'm here in Gaza and all I see is food, water, and opportunity. 

But instead of Hamas distributing the ramen noodles, they're eating it all. 

And that's why their leaders are on OMPic because that's all they have left. 

They don't have anything anymore. 

But it's too late. 

We're never going to forget what it looks like when Palestinians hold their children in plastic bags. 

No one can forget that. 

I'm never going to forget the sound of a drone emitting a crying baby so it can massacre children who come out of their homes and get lured like a cat and mouse. 

No one's going to forget that. 

No one's going to forget what it looks like in Gaza today. 

You can't wash that away.

You can't paper over that with degenerate propaganda base level lies.

No one's going to paper over the unvarnished truth of what we've all witnessed for years now.

Sweet darkness

 When your eyes are tired

the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone

no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark

where the night has eyes

to recognize its own.

There you can be sure

you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb

tonight.

The night will give you a horizon

further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.

The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds

except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet

confinement of your aloneness

to learn

anything or anyone

that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

David Whyte

False Compassion Always Ends in Hatred

Kat Smith

There is a version of compassion that feels real from the inside. 

It shows up as concern for the vulnerable, anger at injustice, a pull toward the underdog. It posts. It signals. It organizes. And the people who carry it genuinely believe in it, at least until the object of their concern does something that loses their approval. Then it evaporates. Not gradually. Immediately.

That disappearing act is the tell.

Real compassion does not have a revocation clause.

Buddhism has spent two thousand years studying the difference between these two things, and it is blunter about it than most modern frameworks allow themselves to be. 

The tradition identifies three figures who represent the full architecture of genuine compassion: 

1. Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. 
2. Mañjuśrī, the bodhisattva of wisdom. 
3. Vajrapāṇi, the one Western audiences rarely talk about, the bodhisattva of power, the one who protects the righteous and dismantles what is harmful.

They are presented as a triad deliberately. Not a hierarchy. A triad.

Compassion without wisdom is sentiment. 

Compassion without power is performance. 

The three exist together or they do not function at all.

The distinction the tradition draws is this: 

What most people call compassion is empathy, and empathy is not neutral. It is structurally biased. Neuroscience has confirmed what Buddhist philosophy argued centuries ago: empathy activates most strongly toward people we identify with, people who resemble us, people whose suffering maps onto something we have felt or fear. 

Paul Bloom, in his research on the psychology of empathy, found that empathic response tracks similarity and proximity, not actual suffering. We feel more for one identified individual than for a statistical million. We feel more for those inside our group than outside it. 

Empathy, left to itself, is tribalism with a warm face.

Buddhist compassion, karuṇā in its developed form, is built on something different. 

Not emotional resonance, but rational recognition: 

that every sentient being in cyclic existence is caught in the same structural problem, regardless of whether their suffering looks like ours or whether we like them. 

The aspiration to relieve that suffering is not contingent on approval of the sufferer. It cannot be revoked. It extends equally to the person you admire and the person who has made your life difficult.

That is not a feeling. That is a trained orientation. 

And it requires a level of psychological stability that most people have not developed, which is exactly why the tradition insists it must be cultivated, not assumed.

Now here is where it gets uncomfortable.

The counterfeit version, what the tradition would recognize as compassion that has not cleared the threshold, follows a specific psychological pattern. 

It begins with genuine empathy, which then gets recruited by something else: 

the need for cover.

Social psychologists call this moral licensing through collective identity. 

The mechanism works like this: 

an individual who feels genuinely threatened by the demands of reality, competition, accountability, the exposure of direct engagement, finds that aligning with a suffering group offers protection. 

The group’s moral weight becomes a shield. 

To strengthen that shield, the individual amplifies the group’s cause publicly, loudly, and continuously.

The external behavior looks like advocacy. 

The internal driver is self-protection.

The irony is that this person often feels very little for the people they claim to represent. 

The energy is not directed inward toward those people’s actual welfare. 

It is directed outward, at those perceived as threats. 

What starts as apparent concern ends as organized hostility toward competitors. 

The compassion was always, underneath, a hostility looking for a legitimate address.

This is why false compassion and resentment have the same psychological fingerprint. 

Both originate in the same place: 

an unwillingness to face reality directly, and a need to make the difficulty someone else’s fault.

Here is what the tradition says about what genuine compassion actually produces, and this is the part that surprises most people.

It produces wealth.

Not metaphorically. 

The connection between compassion and material prosperity in Buddhist practice is explicit and documented across the tradition. 

The Dharmakīrti lineage, the wealth deity practices, the puṇya framework, all of them point to the same mechanism: 

genuine compassion requires you to face reality without flinching. 

You cannot feel the weight of suffering across sentient existence and simultaneously retreat into fantasy about how things work. 

The wisdom component forces clarity. 

And clarity, applied to actual conditions in the actual world, produces accurate judgment.

The person who has done this work sees how systems function, where value is actually created, what people genuinely need versus what they say they need. They are not running from competition. They have understood it. They are not softened by sentiment into ineffectiveness. They have the Vajrapāṇi component, the capacity to act with force where force is what the situation requires.

This is not the personality profile of someone who cannot handle reality. 

It is the personality profile of someone who has metabolized it at a deeper level than most.

The worth sitting with is not whether you are compassionate.

It is what your compassion costs you.

Real compassion is expensive. 

It requires facing what you would rather not face, caring for what you would rather not care for, and building something real in a world that does not always reward that.

 

It does not let you hide. 

It does not let you use the suffering of others as a position from which to attack the people who make you feel small.

If your compassion makes you feel safe, if it functions as armor more than as responsibility, it is worth asking what it is actually made of.

What do you find harder: genuinely caring about someone you disagree with, or admitting that you don’t?

 Neo Shakya

Helen of Troy Does Countertop Dancing

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 The world is full of women

who'd tell me I should be ashamed of myself

if they had the chance. Quit dancing.

Get some self-respect

and a day job.

Right. And minimum wage,

and varicose veins, just standing

in one place for eight hours

behind a glass counter

bundled up to the neck, instead of

naked as a meat sandwich.

Selling gloves, or something.

Instead of what I do sell.

You have to have talent

to peddle a thing so nebulous

and without material form.

Exploited, they'd say. Yes, any way

you cut it, but I've a choice

of how, and I'll take the money.

I do give value.

Like preachers, I sell vision,

like perfume ads, desire

or its facsimile. Like jokes

or war, it's all in the timing.

I sell men back their worse suspicions:

that everything's for sale,

and piecemeal. They gaze at me and see

a chain-saw murder just before it happens,

when thigh, ass, inkblot, crevice, tit, and nipple

are still connected.

Such hatred leaps in them,

my beery worshippers! That, or a bleary

hopeless love. Seeing the rows of heads

and upturned eyes, imploring

but ready to snap at my ankles,

I understand floods and earthquakes, and the urge

to step on ants. I keep the beat,

and dance for them because

they can't. The music smells like foxes,

crisp as heated metal

searing the nostrils

or humid as August, hazy and languorous

as a looted city the day after,

when all the rape's been done

already, and the killing,

and the survivors wander around

looking for garbage

to eat, and there's only a bleak exhaustion.

Speaking of which, it's the smiling

tires me out the most.

This, and the pretence

that I can't hear them.

And I can't, because I'm after all

a foreigner to them.

The speech here is all warty gutturals,

obvious as a slab of ham,

but I come from the province of the gods

where meanings are lilting and oblique.

I don't let on to everyone,

but lean close, and I'll whisper:

My mother was raped by a holy swan.

You believe that? You can take me out to dinner.

That's what we tell all the husbands.

There sure are a lot of dangerous birds around.

Not that anyone here

but you would understand.

The rest of them would like to watch me

and feel nothing. Reduce me to components

as in a clock factory or abattoir.

Crush out the mystery.

Wall me up alive

in my own body.

They'd like to see through me,

but nothing is more opaque

than absolute transparency.

Look--my feet don't hit the marble!

Like breath or a balloon, I'm rising,

I hover six inches in the air

in my blazing swan-egg of light.

You think I'm not a goddess?

Try me.

This is a torch song.

Touch me and you'll burn.

Margaret Atwood

in, Morning in the Burned House

The Incredible Perspective of Trauma Survivors

 

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What perspective 

are you viewing life 

through today?

This is a discussion point I often have with my clients—and one I encourage you to sit with as you read. As a therapist who specializes in working with individuals who have experienced complex trauma, I am continually humbled by the strength, resilience, and profound insight trauma survivors bring to their lives and relationships. 

 

Their perspectives are not only shaped by what they’ve endured, also by what they’ve overcome, how they’ve coped, and what they’ve learned along the way.

Survivors of trauma—especially those who have engaged in healing work already—see the world in layered, textured, and deeply meaningful ways. The very nature of trauma can fracture a person’s sense of safety, identity, and trust. Healing brings integration. Survivors hold a powerful duality: fear and courage, vulnerability and strength, heartbreak and hope.

The Survivor’s Dual Lens

Trauma survivors who have walked through the pain and emerged—perhaps scarred, also still standing—carry a perspective that says: 

“Things feel scary – they were very scary – AND I have survived terrible things before.”

That’s a different kind of strength. 

It’s not about denying fear or pretending things are okay when they’re not. 

It’s about acknowledging the fear and remembering that you’ve made it through dark times before. You’ve felt the bottom drop out—and you’ve clawed your way back to solid ground. 

You are safe today.

Survivors often live with the leftover residue of their trauma. 

They live with hypervigilance. 

Their nervous systems are finely attuned to danger—sometimes too attuned. 

And alongside this heightened awareness can be an inner knowing: 

“I know how to survive.”

This lived wisdom makes the current triggers and threats feel more manageable, because it’s not their first time navigating uncertainty. This doesn’t mean it’s easy. It does mean there’s a kind of internal compass that trauma survivors begin to trust over time.

And as healing progresses, something else begins to emerge: Curiosity. Compassion. A sense of safety. 

These are hard-won states of being that don’t come overnight—but they are deeply meaningful when they arrive.

Living Within (and Outside of) Your Window of Tolerance

As trauma survivors move through life, their experiences often fall inside or outside what we in the trauma therapy world call the “window of tolerance.” 

This is the zone where a person can function and process emotions without becoming overwhelmed or shut down. Inside the window, you’re able to think clearly, stay present, and feel connected to yourself and others.

When you’re pushed outside of that window—by a trigger, stressor, or memory—you might find yourself either:

1. Hyperaroused (anxious, panicky, reactive, flooded), or
2. Hypoaroused (numb, disconnected, shut down, or frozen).

Many trauma survivors have a narrower window of tolerance due to chronic or complex trauma. 

Part of the healing journey is recognizing when you’re outside your window—and learning skills to widen it over time.

When survivors say things like “I feel overwhelmed,” “I can’t think straight,” or “I’m just going through the motions,”—these can be signs that they’ve been pushed beyond that emotional window. And yet, with support, the window can expand. With time, the capacity to tolerate emotional intensity, to stay present in relationships, and to face challenges without becoming dysregulated can grow.

When the Sky Feels Like It’s Falling

On the other end of the spectrum are those moments—or even entire seasons—when objectively you may be safe today and yet – trauma feels fresh, overwhelming, and raw. Perhaps you’re just beginning to uncover old wounds. Or maybe current life events have stirred up pain you didn’t realize was buried deep inside.

In those moments, the perspective might feel like: 

“The world is dangerous. The sky is falling. I’m not okay.”

This isn’t a failure—it’s part of the human experience. 

In fact, this is often how trauma announces itself. 

Through panic. Through disorientation. Through waves of feeling that feel “too big,” too much, or completely out of proportion. 

You might be confused by your own responses—or you might notice that others are.

You’re not overreacting. 

You’re having a trauma response. 

This is what it looks like when the body remembers what the mind has worked hard to forget. 

Maybe you had a coping strategy or survival skill that helped you function for years. 

And then, seemingly out of nowhere, that strategy stops working. 

The buried feelings surface. The wind gets knocked out of you. And suddenly, you’re left reeling.

This too is a part of the trauma survivor’s journey.

The Space Between: Where Healing Lives

Healing doesn’t happen all at once. 

It unfolds in layers, often over time. 

And one of the clearest signs of healing is that your perspective begins to shift.

Maybe you start out with a belief like: 

“I don’t trust anybody but myself.” 

Then, gradually as your window of tolerance widens, you begin to allow in safe people, safe moments, and even safe emotions which then softens your perspective to: 

“I don’t trust most people, but there are a few who care about me.”  

Eventually, you might arrive at: 

“Many people are doing the best they can, and I can choose who I trust” or

“I can navigate uncertainty and still feel connected.” 

Each shift represents not just a change in belief, but an expansion of your nervous system’s capacity to stay present and regulated.

That’s growth. That’s resilience in action. That’s trauma-informed healing.

Trauma doesn’t just teach you about pain. 

In the experiences of awful, you somehow made it out! 

There is no silver lining for trauma – you did NOT deserve that pain! 

That said, the process of moving forward from trauma teaches you about boundaries, discernment, empathy, and what it means to rebuild. 

It offers you a unique and often profound lens on the world—one that is deeply rooted in survival, and also rich with insight.

All Perspectives Are Valid

There is no one “correct” trauma response. 

Sometimes, survivors feel like everything is F.I.N.E—almost numb, dissociated, or overly functioning. Sometimes, it’s the opposite: everything feels dangerous and nothing feels okay. And sometimes, survivors have healed enough to hold safety and growth along with the fears or the pain.

• “I can be scared AND I can be safe.”
• “I can feel vulnerable AND know I’m strong.”
• “I can struggle AND still be healing.”

The human nervous system is capable of tremendous adaptability. 

What you feel today is not necessarily what you’ll feel forever. 

Even if things feel unbearable right now, perspective is not static. It evolves.

The Strength of Survivors

If you are a trauma survivor, I want you to hear this: your perspective matters. 

It holds wisdom. It holds truth. It reflects not just what happened to you, also how you responded, how you protected yourself, and how you’ve begun to move forward.

You are not broken. 

You are responding in exactly the way your body and brain were wired to respond to overwhelming experiences. That response helped you survive. And now, you have the capacity to grow.

It takes immense courage to face trauma. 

It takes even more courage to begin healing from it. 

And with healing comes a change in perspective—an ability to hold complexity, to sit with ambiguity, to love despite loss, and to trust again, even after betrayal.

What’s Your Perspective Today?

I’ll return to the discussion point I began with: 

What perspective are you viewing life through today? 

You don’t need to have a perfect answer – as you will never have one; there isn’t one. 

The goal is not to “fix” you or your perspective. 

The goal is to understand you and your perspective, hold with compassion, and allow shifts in your perspective as you heal.

Trauma may have shaped your view of the world—and so has your strength, your resilience, your insight, your capacity to love, and your will to keep going.

So, wherever you are in your journey—numb or overwhelmed, fiercely independent or cautiously hopeful—your perspective is valid. And it’s part of the story you’re still writing.

You are a survivor. 

And that perspective is nothing short of incredible. 

Robyn E. Brickel