::Shefa:: How can you upgrade your feelings?

In this hour of our grief, in this collective Dark Night of the Soul for this Nation and for humanity, O Wise One, I feel violated and remain vulnerable. I feel angry and upset. I feel the monumental loss caused by this senseless violence. And I feel swayed from feeling to feeling. I want to react and I need to do something.

It is my human tendency, O Wise One, to try to find blame, and put a face to the culprit and his associates. I am tempted to demonize the perpetrators of this evil act. Because then, I can justifiably target them and extract my revenge. Grant me the Serenity to distinguish the difference between Justice and Revenge.

It is also my human tendency, O Wise One, to try to dig deeper for the root of this evil, and blame myself. Because the very hands that turned against my neighbors and my kin were the very hands that were trained by my own people. But I know self-blame will only add to the hurt and anger that I feel, and will only fester and create the cancer of bitterness and cynicism. Grant me the Compassion to feel my anger, yet the Love to turn it into constructive action, not bitterness.

O Wise One, as I look at the twisted beams of steel, and the pulverized blanket of concrete that now cover my fellow beings, Grant me the Understanding that to inflict the same pain and misery on another is to stoop lower than the violators of the first tragedy. That any life lost is a loss to humanity. That any stone demolished, any wall brought down in anger, is nothing more than the continuation of the chain of reactionary destruction.

O Wise One, Grant me the Courage to fight and eradicate darkness with my light, evil with my goodness, destruction with my creativity, and death with honoring of life.

O Wise One, Grant me the Wisdom to honor the lost lives and the destroyed efforts, by creating the possibility of building a future, overflowing with Equity, Camaraderie, Compassion and Joy, for all people on this planet.

May we emerge through this Dark Night of the Soul, loving and wise.

May it be so.

Shahriar Shahriari
Los Angeles, CA

http://www.shahriari.com