True Peace

Dear Eugene,

Rain and wind, Sumi hates them.

I don't mind them, sometimes even grow to enjoy them.  Still just as often hate them with the gusto of a mighty gust.

I like them when I can afford to, such as when I was walking across the Granville bridge yesterday after a hearty lunch with a hearty friend, little umbrella in hand, head full of eager anticipation of what's waiting for me at the other end of the rainbow.  Usually a bookstore.

"Raindrops keep falling on my head..." 🎵

The dreamy poet can afford to romanticize because the sickness in him only feels like dying but is nothing remotely close and his healthy steps know it.

When he is up the roof in the rain and wind his sorry poetry would go down the clogged drain he's trying to fix, the word "hate" he spells in many different colorful ways.

Peace in this world is a contingency.  It is the next autumn-themed specialty coffee in our warm hands, a vacation to escape from the hostility of our surrounding elements, a family portrait against an agreement background, rainless, windless, full of life but strangely lifeless.

"You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. With less of you there is more of God and his rule."  Such is your translation of the first line of the most famous sermon in history, the Sermon on the Mount.

True peace.  Surprising, seditious, senseless yet totally sensible.

"On the first reading of the Sermon on the Mount you feel that it turns everything upside down, but the second time you read it, you discover that it turns everything right side up. The first time you read it, you feel that it is impossible, but the second time you feel that nothing else is possible,"  G. K. Chesterton once said.

We participate in the unveiling of true peace by choosing to love God and love man.

Yours, Alex

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