Spring can be the most difficult season of the year catching us between the rising tide of life and the damp caverns of memory that lie among the sleepy roots of our being. It is time to attend the soil that has lain fallow for many months -- we are, after all, animated ground. April can be an agitating month, leaving us to ride out this new, insistent life from places inside us never before reached. Kites, in the driven skies, tug at thin strings that tether them to earth, just as our souls tug at our bodies. Swallows and purple martins dive heart-stoppingly into the emptiness. Something light and lithe in us responds. . . . We are, after all, much more than rational beings.
Paraphrased from Elie Wiesel's THE OATH, an old man describes one of the characters:
He could gamble with his own suffering, but not with that of someone for whom suffering was not a game. He knew that nothing justifies the pain one person causes another. Any messiah in whose name people are tortured can only be a false messiah. It is by diminishing evil, present and real evil, experienced evil, that one builds the city of the sun. It is by helping those persons who look at you with tears in their eyes, needing help, needing you or at least your presence, that you may reach wholeness.