I arose before the cheeks of dawn had had the chance to blush their vibrant hue,

when darkness hung over the world like black ink dripping from a mighty pen. I arose to

find my heart filled to the brim with pain, with joy, with life. Picking up that very pen from

which both light and dark, good and evil emanate, I began to write the story of today–a

tale of great forces entangled in the Cosmic Drama.

At present I am seated on a train. The wheels are humming along the tracks just

as the earth seems to hum as it whirls around the sun, for there is a great joy to motion

that infuses the traveler with the very buzz of existence. Outside my window the curtain

of dawn has begun to lift, revealing the bright orange costumes of actors eager to

astound the audience. What wonders will transpire today? What discoveries? What

ideas spawned and loves consummated?

Of late the pain of being alive has galloped like a ferocious horse to overtake my

sense of bliss. Where once my heart was a tremendous vase containing the freshly cut

flowers of happiness, it had recently become like so many pieces of jagged glass, a

mosaic in whose discord could be seen the very nature of existence. The Sufis say that

a sack of sugar must be sliced open that the sweetness may spill forth, for whoever is

brave enough to seek bliss must also know her by her other name: despair. So many of

us open our arms to beauty thinking that, once she is within our grasp, we can close

ourselves off to everything else. . .yet beauty and bliss are fickle lovers. They refuse to

be confined or defined. They dwell in the spaces between our fingers and only cease to

slip through them when we cease to grasp for them. John Keats said it best when he

wrote that “Beaty is Truth/Truth Beauty/That is all ye know on earth/And all ye need to

know.”

The beauty of this morning has shattered my heart. Splinters of love, kindness

and passion have become lodged in my surroundings. It is infinitely painful to know, as

William Blake wrote, that “if the doors of perception were cleansed everything would

appear to man as it is, infinite.” Yet as I look around me I know without a shadow of a

doubt that anything is possible, that “the arc of history is long but it bends towards

justice,” that poetry blooms from despair like a lotus from the mud.

We have to be brazen in our beliefs and insolent in our actions. It takes a certain

amount of anger to overcome the status quo, to uncover new possibilities and to refuse

to accept received wisdom. We have to think about our weakest moments, when

sadness, death and pain appear before us, not as apparitions, but rather as distinct

realities; and we have to think about who we are in the moments. . .will we be

adventurers, poets and lovers? Will we live up to the dreams we had as children? Will

we uphold the highest and most noble elements of humanity and, in so doing, create a

better world? Oh, I have fallen from my bicycle and nearly died. I have opened my

heart to the vagaries of the world and the doubts of a woman and seen both bliss and

agony come and go like visitors at a grave. I have felt the loftiest and the lowest of

emotions. And yet I can say to you, now that I am 26 years old, that I will never turn

away from my quest; I will never ignore the stirrings in my heart; I will never be anything

other than who I am.

Let us move forward with this feeling, in honor of those that have died, those that suffer

and those that will die at the hands of injustice and indifference.