Our lives are tugged relentlessly

by the stream of challenges

that come across our minds

every day: across screens

that remind us of pressing circumstances

and of our contingency as

vulnerable creatures in the world,

creatures subject to the slings

and arrows of outrageous

fortune, as the Bard has said.

 

Yet our joy, as the delicious fruit

of existence, is not contingent.

Joy comes from the centre

of existence, from finding a

refuge where the flux of the world

cannot touch acceptance of who

we are as beings not swayed

but living in the certainty of embodiment

and shaped by radical compassion.

 

22/7/2022