10/14/2005 - Letter to Amanda

I'm sorry everything is such a nightmare right now... but when you get through this, it will help you to see how beautiful everything is. For me it seems like whenever something terrible happens, after a certain point of pain I am completely, utterly, overwhelmed by the infinite beauty and infinite complexity of this thing called life, and this phenomenon of being. So much so, and after all these years, and a few hardships, sometimes I feel incapacitated by it. I sit outside and look up at the sky at the clouds moving slowly and think about how the clouds are our backdrop, and we are theirs and I cry about the beauty of it... this happens many times a day... I cry for joy, I don't know what it is.. some sort of divine ecstacy I've been experiencing... but I have gone off on a tangent.

Life is not beautiful for me right now... it's far from perfect, and my heart hurts every day about 'lost love' and yearning, and dreams that are far away. You haven't shred your love for the gods of war. You fight because you love each other. If you didn't, you wouldn't care enough to. Every transformation takes its form in destruction, and pain. It hurts, it hurts! I am hurting with you, and for you, and for myself- but everything that is going on is telling you something about the way the earth is turning, and the way the heavens pull on us, and the way the atoms dance- and it's terrible and beautiful at the same time...

I know it's hard to see the good in this... its a bit of a paradox, because in one way, there IS no good in this, and in another, that is what is profound about it... and it is one vivid, deep, dark and rich drop of paint in the landscape of your soul. Try not to mourn the loss of something beautiful until it settles like dust on the ground and becomes something insignificant. And you and I know, as far as we know, that in this situation, that will never happen.