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| Leonor Fini - La Passagere |
The beauty of life shares the same root system with the difficulty of life. Indeed, the deeper your embrace of life's beauty, the greater the difficulties that rise up all around you.
But it is NOT the truly human choice to rip out that whole root system, i.e., to sacrifice the beauty in order to eradicate the difficulty.
The bitter irony is that those who choose to attempt it end up killing out the beauty, and being left to contend with even more virulent strains of difficulty.
The truly human choice is to utterly embrace the beauty, in all of its vulnerability and transitoriness, and with eyes wide open to the greater difficulty that arrives in the same moment. From this brave choice arises a poignancy, a powerful poignancy, in which both the beauty and the difficulty are held perfectly, as if by the hands of some invisible goddess.
Turning to face difficulty from inside of this great poignancy, one is witness to yet another miracle: from inside of the difficulty itself, a fierce simplicity arises.
The difficulty is still difficulty, but from here it is translucent, and it carries within it this mysterious simplicity. So now, stepping toward the difficulty instead of away from it, you are also stepping toward the fierce simplicity inside of it.
And with each step forward, the fierce simplicity invites you in ever deeper, until you are moving from inside of the fierce simplicity itself, and the very nature of difficulty has changed forever. All the while, you have held beauty in your arms.
-- Richard Power
