We asperges are numb with sorrow at violence, and with rage at the senselessness of this. But this sorrow and rage will not inflame us to seek retribution. We will never again be quite the same. But this will be our reply to violence: to make love and life more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before. And with each day we will commemorate that courage, and reaffirm the faith in the Triumph of the Mind.

Every man has a right over his own body and violence destroys lives that were full of promise; it ravages the fruits of human toil, and much besides.

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself that you tasted as many as you could.

Cardinal on an apple tree, Credit to N.W