Human beings are delicate creatures. We are sensitive, intuitive, emotional. Our sensitivity is our evolution. It is also our vulnerability. We feel, and we are easily bruised. Our skins are porous to let the world in and let our love out. We aspirate through our skin. We breathe each other in and we breathe our hearts out. Even when we erect filters and barriers, the world still enters in and often knocks us about.

Accessing our feelings, finding a safe space for our emotional world, and being able to talk about our experience of hurt or fear has been a path restricted to far too many. Machismo cultures block men from their frailty and from their gentleness. Only in the Lamb can they find a place to lay down their burden or rest their head in the Mother’s lap, and be able to cry for Love, for loss, for comfort, for succor. Cry from the human longing to finally come home.

Black men wear their stoicness as armour but the bullets of the street and a system that assaults their bodies, minds, and souls still rip through. They lodge their invisible shells deep within, hiding the hurts, the memories from the very self they inhabit. How can any human being heal so many ongoing assaults?

Latino boys laugh and joke, quick to anger, loyal to each other. Their dreams and gentleness are submerged, like springy hummus under thousands of tons of weight. The mountains of the world’s cares press down, pressure forms coal, eventually diamonds–but when will these diamonds be cooked? We will all be long gone by then.

And on it goes.

The soldiers of Israel bury their memories with a casualness, an intensity, an unquestioned conviction in inevitability so they can go on and live their lives, raise their children, buy pretty things for their homes. But the scars are there, secreted away from their spouses and themselves.

The youth of Europe or Scandinavia are tossed to and fro, like flotsam on cultural tides, unable to find port and anchor, a respite, a home, so afloat are they, they have forgotten even the memory of stability. In their moorlessness, they reach and grasp nothing. Life slips to the floor like a pretty silk scarf. The parties and dandies hide the underbelly of loneliness, blindness, hurt, and hurting.

Where and how do we begin? All great Neptune’s oceans are not enough to wash these hurts . . .

And yet, there is a way, a method, a path.

We find safety in that stillness within where we breathe infinity, rest in wholeness prior to everything that has occurred, and drink in goodness unstained by the shadows of the world.

Meditation releases us into that irrepressible goodness. It breathes and sings wholeness. It uplifts with the experience of oneness prior to ever having the notion of two. It unveils a backdrop of eternity and constancy within which all the actions of the universe arise and pass away. Resting in meditative awareness opens the aperture of our minds and then our hearts and then our souls to that which has no description and yet has so many names. Whatever you call it, in that dimension happiness, awe, and wonder flow again in our veins, enlivening, awakening so we can skip and dance and jump and run.

Meditation ties the thread of connection to our fingers so in all our scarred brokenness we connect with that which is whole, becoming it. We drink from the sweet well of being and find renewal for our tired bones. The stillness jostles the seed of our hearts, a shoot pokes through once again, a sprig of life greets the morning and, against all odds, it grows.

Meditation does not heal wounds. We heal. Meditation does not create reparations. We repair. Meditation does not absolve us. We seek and understand the effects of actions set in motion. In understanding we find freedom.

Freedom wings across clear skies, like a bird on a high current. She may disappear past the horizon or be enveloped in the mist of a cloud. But we can still feel her pulsing wings, her glide, her presence everywhere and at no steady point. She releases us to experience the winds of wisdom. The winds of Love that wash through grief. The winds of healing that seal sores and soften the rough ridges of scars. She unites this world with mystery and us with those we’ve loved and lost, enabling us to see, that for her, there never was any separation or brokenness.

Drink deeply in meditation. The journey of healing takes great Love and great faith. Rest in that unbroken wholeness, that irrepressible goodness. It is from there that all things become possible.