Member-only story
The Glass of Muddy Water
It’s time to be still.
(Read that sentence again. Then do it before reading on.)
Trauma, horror, devastation are everywhere — whether because of mankind’s violence or because of nature’s response to our ignorance and greed.
We can doomscroll or we can look away. Neither will make us feel better. Even raging at the machine will not significantly change anything out there.
Humankind has contained the same elements — from the sacred to the profane — throughout all time. You reading this, and I writing it, are just different recipes of everything we see out there. We have it all in us, we just emphasize different ingredients in ourselves.
“I don’t have the terrorist in me, though,” you might say. And you might be right about you.
But I know that, for me, if I believed something enough — if I truly believed that what I was doing was inherently a good deed, even if it caused devastation for some — if I believed that it was an act of sacrifice and patriotism, that my family and my people were better off because of it…I might have it in me.
My beliefs create who I am in the world and how I behave.
It’s important to pay attention to what they are.
