There are creative seeds buried in people, no matter how oppressed they have been, and you can find these seeds in their stories. With the recent extreme rains here, seeds of plants that have been dormant for centuries are sprouting. They have somehow kept themselves alive for all that time. This same potential is always alive inside people.
A mature creative life, which has discovered its source, finds it is linked to everything. Creation actually requires too little from us, and there is not much in our culture that teaches us to pay attention to the things that require less. These things give birth to the unpredictable surprises that inspire a larger and deeper soul connection with creative life. With the soul well tended, even when all is lost, our creation lives larger than its physical limits. The best that any of us can do with the heaven and hell that surrounds us is to become willing participants in the unfolding of our soul's life. Any creative act emerging from this tending becomes one with the elements of the Mystery.
The stripping of pettiness from life in those early days of the war, the sense of unity and mutual help among all sorts and conditions of people, was a thing no one who was in England at that time could ever forget. There was an atmosphere of forgiveness everywhere, that most rare of human qualities...such moments reveal the beauty hidden in the most unlikely persons and affirm the truth, "what a piece of work is man, is woman!"