...in our culture, it has been aptly observed, "we are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us." In his stirring Syracuse commencement address, George Saunders confessed with unsentimental ruefulness: "What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness." I doubt any decent person, upon candid reflection, would rank any other species of regret higher. To be human is to leap toward our highest moral potentialities, only to trip over the foibled actualities of our reflexive patterns. To be a good human is to keep leaping anyway.
Last night, after praying Compline in the darkness, the final verse of the last Psalm began to move around inside me, like the Spanish canto hondo -- deep song.I found myself cooperating with this music, leaning into it, knowing that when its last note vanished into the silence, another leaf would be living in the tree I call "myself".
~ from DANCING MADLY BACKWARDS by Paul Marechal