“There is no object so foul that intense light will not make beautiful…”

…has always been one of my favorite quotes. 

I don’t know if I believe that it’s true, but I want it to be. 

I want to believe that everything, everyone, has a purpose. That there are no accidents. That even the worst of us plays a role in the story of life that in a certain light makes sense, that redemption is possible for anyone, on a long enough timeline. 

I think ultimately it’s probably because like Ralph Waldo Emerson, I want to believe in God – but not a man in the sky version of God, the version of God where the Holy Trinity is Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. 

This image is kind of cheating (or maybe just missing the point), but… I like pretty things…

It’s ultimately kind of a desire just to believe that even when life sucks, if you could see things the way they are, exactly how they are, that maybe the inescapable and infinite suffering of being alive isn’t a cruel joke but the mechanism by which the universe polishes consciousness into something more and more beautiful. 

I don’t think that life is fair. I don’t believe in karma, or divine justice. But I do think that even though we think we’re all separate pieces of the human puzzle, fighting to take up space, that we’re actually not puzzle pieces at all, but raindrops that only exist as drops while they’re falling, but end up back in the same body of water as all the other drops, in the end, and so everything we do to other people while we’re alive winds up being something we did to ourselves, too, and the ultimate joke is that God isn’t a Great Judge in the Sky who tallies up our good and bad deeds, but just a metaphor to understand the fact that we were never really separate from everything else, at all.