When I seek ease in my struggles to accept the complexity of this world, I re-read this excerpt by Barry Lopez on becoming an adult:

“How is one to live a moral and compassionate existence when one is fully aware of the blood, the horror inherent in life, when one finds darkness not only in one’s culture but within oneself?

If there is a stage at which an individual life becomes truly adult, it must be when one grasps the irony in its unfolding and accepts responsibility for a life lived in the midst of such paradox.

One must live in the middle of contradiction, because if all contradiction were eliminated at once life would collapse.

There are simply no answers to some of the great pressing questions. You continue to live them out, making your life a worthy expression of leaning into the light.”

Barry Lopez

“One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites—polar opposites—so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love….

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”

— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.