The Jewish holiday of Purim celebrates the courage and cleverness of Esther in defeating a plot to kill the Jews. Yes, a certain amount of misdirection was involved.
When, if ever, are you willing to compromise your ethics for the sake of the result?
“We can’t breathe” has become a powerful slogan in the movement to protest police brutality against unarmed Black people, recalling the final words of Eric Garner before he was choked to death by police. But there are many less literal ways that people are prevented from being able to draw a full, free, unhindered breath.
What impedes your ability to breathe freely?
Those who have been in active combat often suffer PTSD from the horrors that they have witnessed. But all of us have been witness to horrors, whether through personal experiences of violence or injustice or from more distant views of just how inhumane people can be.
What helps you to make sense of the worst things that you have seen?
Breaking Ground
Living in the violence of spring—
living in a time
where shells are cracking
and shapes alter,
who can afford to risk
forgetting the danger,
forgetting the moment
the crocus bulb breaks ground,
never knowing whether
snow or sun or ice
awaits in warm or jagged welcome….
There are no choices here—
no careful path or
reasoned way,
no holding in reserve for
some more settled,
more propitious time,
but only the unconsidered
faith of the crocus
whose saffron petals echo
or demand the sun.
—Lynn Ungar
What is struggling to break ground in your life?
“When you are broken open you get to discover for the first time what is inside you.”
―Bryant McGill
What have you discovered inside yourself through being broken open?
