→Storybook 1: Credo

[seol_plumfall]

This world into which we have been born is filled with sadness and suffering.

With such tender hearts in our breasts, with such feeble minds, with such weak bodies are we born – born into this violent, chaotic world. And so easily, so casually can the winds of this world tear away our loves, crush our tiny bones – so quickly can voices disappear and fragile lives turn to dust.

And how the peoples of this world rob and wound each other. How they fear each other, how they cringe away from one another's arrows and swords and run wailing and cursing from the aggressions, the betrayals. And how, at the same time, they die under the weight of their loneliness, stretching out their arms and begging their enemies for kindness, pleading, through tears.

How this world overflows with pain. And you, too, will experience sorrow too great to for your soul to contain. The things beloved to your heart will be ripped away; your body will fail and disintegrate, and you, too, will understand this world's vast despair.



However, this world's despair, the inevitability of death, even the destruction of our souls – none of it precludes happiness.

Of all the cruelty and suffering this world may contain, none of it renders meaningless love.

For, no matter how we suffer, as long as we are alive, we can still desire.

Indeed, when pain so pierces our hearts we can do nothing but cry, we cry for happiness; we cry because we want to be free to bloom, to realize ourselves, to raise ourselves up closer and closer to joy.

Even when we sit, deaf and blind, within the most impenetrable despair, we can still reach out for the things we desire – to live, to exist, to be loved, to create, together, a little bit of happiness. We can still cry out in that darkness, "Someone, help me."

We can still give birth to a tiny light of hope that illuminates the darkness.

And we can reach towards the hands of others to join our desires with theirs – we can mingle our tears with theirs, cry for them, join their tiny hopes to our own, treasure them inside ourselves. And by making their pain our pain, their desire our desire, we can join with this world's vast memory of suffering and its vast imagining of happiness, and bring into existence love, more and more and more.

And it is this way – shedding tears for the suffering of this world, understanding the suffering in this world, enfolding the sufferers of this world within our love – that we can push, feebly, pitifully, against our painful fate.

And even if, in the darkness, you have taken a misstep – even if you have stumbled deeper into despair, even if you have increased the suffering of yourself and others – you can continue to hope and to try. Even if your body is covered by wounds, even if you can hardly walk under the weight of your sins, you can still raise your face up and try, try, with the tiny shred of your strength, to be born. To exist. To learn, more and more, about what happiness is.

And although you will surely stumble and bleed, although your most loved ones will surely slip through your fingers and die, although you will surely understand hatred and loneliness and despair, as long as you hope, as long as you struggle to protect and give birth to that fragile, tiny hope, you will, at least, exist.

And if we join our hearts together, if we join our desires together, if we raise each other up into the light, perhaps we will be able to become ourselves and learn what happiness is.

So, I beg of you, reach out with your desire and, in order to be loved, help someone.

For it is my desire to reach out and, to become myself, give my love, and save.

title
1: Credo
2: On the Legion
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4: On comparing one type of love with another