Our habit of hurting; don't those actions often manifest a quality that can only be called brilliance? The innate wisdom which is inalienably ours as a consequence of our human birth endows us all not only with the makings of common-sense (drink when thirsty, sleep when tired) but also with the stuff of brilliance, which is creative and flexible responsiveness in the moment. Anyone who has experience the presence of someone deeply inspired by resentment and bitterness may have felt the impact of creatively hurtful words precisely delivered with a single-minded determination and intent to wound. As one commentator would have it, "Negativity is brilliance competing with itself." In a less violent vein, those who declare verbal ineptitude often display huge presence of mind and tongue in the moment. In the service of self, brilliance is as though the technology of war.

It's a poor life that has in it no memory of a meaningful gesture. By this I mean an act which was significant far beyond its material components. Perhaps because of the motive and state of mind that it made manifest, perhaps because of the consequences it entailed so effectively ... in any case, a deeply communicative gesture derives its gracefull efficacy from its deep harmony with all of the other elements at play in the moment. Just as the precise archery of the hurtful can find the mark through even a slit-opening of vulnerability, so can a tender heart sense the invitation that is a gap in otherwise breachless personal defenses. Both of these are brilliant, in their sensivity and precision. Just as the spiteful can poison an association, so the loving can nurture the frailest tendril of hope.

Even in the moment where we hold the root of suffering, we encounter our engagement with others. Our experience of suffering is less different from others' than it is the same; our yearning for happiness no keener. It is in abandoning our solidarity and declaring ourselves sovereign that we transform ourselves from healers to weapons-masters. Though the consequences of ill-will may even usually entail a hardening of heart and a withering of spirit, the nature of reality does not command us to resign our powers, and so we apply them to the not-so-new ends of securing our happiness at the expense of others.

If we retain the heart-and-head connection to the moment that contains others also, and we retain our powers of brilliance and precision, even when we have turned away from the rest of our human family, it must then be that the opportunity never fades. The attitude that is comprised by the hope, wish, and will to end suffering necessarily results in a redirection of those energies. Specifically, the realization that suffering may be ended gives rise to joy, which compels us to include others' good in our considerations. An honest appreciation unbiased by hope of gain for self or fear of loss produces loving-kindness. Underlieing these two is compassion, which serves to empower activity by ensuring that no moment is too brief and no individual too humble to escape our rapt and relaxed attention; in every moment, without exception, realization is at hand.

!E.Ma.Ho!
To have the good fortune of having been born human!

!Kye.Ho!
That we persist in our self-destructive folly, hurting others in thinking of ourselves!