We welcome [love’s] cruelest blows and when we bleed from them, we whisper our thanks.

We all believe in something: self, non-self, an omnipotent creator, karma, science, reality, emptiness, dragons, elves… . When we see that belief gives color to every stratum of our experience of reality, we can embrace others as kindred believers, regardless of the shades we tend to favor.

If there was a God of sorrow, he would grow black heavy wings, to soar not for the skies, but for inferno.

If you were far out in space, you would see that the sun neither rises nor sets, but that it shines continuously. And yet, even after realizing that, we can continue to speak of the sunrise or sunset, still see its beauty, paint it, write poems about it, even though we now know that it is a relative rather than an absolute truth.

Loving kindness towards ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. It means we can still be crazy after all these years. We can still be angry after all these years. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. The point is not to try to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already.