Rinse and Repeat

Welcome, beautiful traveler. I greet you with a sense being on a too-familiar path.

I conceived of this religion from a point of desperation, a borderland where hope for humanity and the expectation of happiness seemed in danger of falling behind me, while ahead lay only desolation.

Have you been to this place? Have you seen too clearly the warts and wickedness that people choose to show the world, while joy and decency appear only as far-off heat shimmers in a desert? Having reached and been disappointed by too many mirages, do you now doubt that the desert itself has any end at all?

Well, if you are reading this, then you have proof that things are not so bad as you fear.

I am no mirage. I am real. I care about people -- I care about how the world turns out. If you feel the same way, then we have cause for jubilation. This life is not all carelessness and hurtfulness and callous disregard for others.

You are there, and I am here, and between us, I assure you there are a thousand like us, a legion caught by our own ability to imagine a world much better than this one.

What we must do, you and I, is to stop seeing that imagination as a curse that holds us in a place ever-inferior to our mind’s green landscapes, and see it instead as a gift and a tool.

For without those who can imagine a better world, how can the world ever improve itself?

Let us step off the path that leads into the desert -- because the desert, too, is just a figment of our imaginations.

Stand with me, clear-eyed, in the real world, and remember that all our imaginings have been spurred by true things, by things we have actually seen. Having seen good, we can create better. We must simply have the will to try.

Thank you, goddess of love, for the ability to recognize, to remember -- to rededicate.

Lovingly yours,

A devotee