I wish you the sweetness of sticky kisses, the fragrance of muddy bouquets of weeds, the simplicity of macaroni necklaces, the warmth of bedtime snug… - L.R. Knost

Sometimes life hurts.
We suffer. We heal. We move on.
But sometimes life hits back. Harder.
Lethal in its cruelty.
Shattering us into a million glittering shards
of pain and loss and anguish.
And we suffer, too broken to heal,
to become what we once were.
So we learn to live
with the shards of pain and loss and anguish
forever embedded in our souls,
and with shaking fingers we piece together
the bloody fragments of who we were
into a mosaic grotesque in its stark reality,
exquisite in its sharp-edged story
of the tragic, breathless beauty of a
human who survived life.
And we move on, often unaware
of the light glittering behind us
showing others the way
through the darkness.

Growing children with an inner compass that guides their steps toward kindness and compassion and generosity of spirit is far, far and away superior to training children to operate on automatic pilot.

The only way to heal from the pain
of the past is to walk through that pain
in the present. It's terrifying, I know.
It feels safer to just let the pain continue
to smolder in the darkest parts of yourself.
But the dark parts need tending, too, my friend.
Don't be afraid to breathe life back into those
embers of old pain, to rekindle the fires of
unhealed hurts. The flames aren't there to burn
you. They are there to light your way through
pain to healing. You can walk through courageous
and confident or shaking in your boots. It doesn't
matter. Just walk through it. Hurt will transform
into hope, wounds into wisdom, suffering into
scars that tell of battles won and lost and of a
human who survived it all.