The practice of forgiveness is our most important contribution to the healing of the world.

(Marianne Williamson)

These incredible arms that we are endowed with, can move at will, to gesture praise or to curse, to caress and strangle, to protect and destroy. These thoughts, feelings, and speech that we carry, can be used to communicate humbly, and generate laughter, consolation, and forgiveness, or for self-aggrandizement to promote ignorance, fear, violence, and prejudice.

Negative thoughts and feelings, in secret whispers, can poison the others, through calumny and generalization, fueled by our darkest fears, can align with the fears of others to give rise to waves of hatred and animosity.

However, those same thoughts and feelings, when attuned to that inner voice that once said “let he who has no sins cast the first stone”, can shower instead, compassion, and the gift of forgiveness.

This fascinating mind of ours! It has blessed us with technology, to heal and prolong life, to alleviate suffering, to look beyond our senses and magnify our awe at the cosmic miracle of universe and life. But it also has given us the tools of mass destruction, the capacity to magnify the power of our strangling and sword carrying hands, to shower death in an instant, not just to a fighting face-to-face adversary, but to dozens, hundreds, thousands, millions of our fellow living beings.

From the mass graves of Eastern Europe, the ovens of Germany, the fields of Rwanda, the prairies of western United States, the coliseum of Rome, the Tiananmen square, the slave trade of Africa, the religious wars of India, the crusades, the Armenian purge, the conquest of America, the "collateral damages", the rape of Nanking, the burnt flesh of Hiroshima, to the dance halls of Orlando. Massacres have occurred every day, throughout recorded and not recorded history, perpetrated by governments, tribes, religions, ethnic groups, individuals, who have become possessed by the fear inside, disguised it as hatred for the demonized others, and shed the blood of others so many times.

It is a cycle of fear, manifested in action, inspired by our fearful voices that contrary to that sweet voice that posed the question of casting the first stone, calls for generalization, condemnation, demonization, fear, revenge, ignorance. Again, and again.

They live within us. These voices, these feelings, some dormant, some active, some in thought form, the voices of hatred and forgiveness, of aggression and embracing, of self-aggrandizement and humility, of inspiration and fear mongering. I watch them inside in my thought screens, and outside, displayed in history books, on televised news, on the verses and blasts of social networks, in all the virtual plazas that connect us. They all live within us, within me.

These opinions of knowing for certain, while knowing well that we know naught, these assertions of ego, as life bubbles up every morning, and dances in every possible environment, as light falls kindly from the confines of the most remote universe, as we spin suspended incomprehensibly in the space and time of existence, we fear, and hate and love, and accuse, and forgive, and live and die, inevitably.

Today, I just want to curl up small, like a ball of dust on an insignificant corner, and forgive myself and forgive all others, the loudmouths and the quiet ones, the witnesses, and the perpetrators, and implore forgiveness for all this terrible mess that we bring to ourselves, in our ignorance while this inevitable garden of life blooms, notwithstanding us, as it loves, and seeks the light, and shares the joy.

Let us please, turn the light on and drop the stones!