Hate is easy
Love takes courage
When I choose to live in my fear, my anger, my hate
I see the world through eyes that fear
I hear the song of anger in every note
I taste hatred as if all sustenance were the bitterest root
In my mind
I place the world of power, control and duplicity
Above the world of beauty, compassion and love
So that all that is wrong exists in the world outside me
And the only course of correction, an expression of violence
It is not my fault
It is not my responsibility
It becomes right that I fear
That I am angry
That I hate
Then I am truly mired in my own pain, in my own suffering
From which even a utopia could not rescue me
For I could never perceive one
And would soon enough destroy it
I choose love every time.
Hate is such an extreme and intensely hostile word……..and yet everyone who’s seen or felt it knows it’s real, in some way at least. Hate destroys……..
On the other hand, love gives hope, it’s not only something that you feel, it’s something that you do.
Choose love
I would love to say I choose love every time. But honesty demands that I am not always so self-aware.
There’s little enough capacity for hate in me now. My emotional pique rarely expands further than anger. But I’ll still get caught there, and find myself acting on it, like I did last night in a conversation, trying to bring some insight to a friend of a friend, but a well-meaning gift could not be taken as such and, after a couple attempts to create understanding, I responded to hostility in kind.
Mmmm… and from that conversation sprang The Crucible of Suffering: Pain. I had to feel my own anger, and beneath it my own fear, and beneath that my own pain to understand why, in that moment, I could not choose love. I could not even choose to walk away. I chose, instead, anger.