In my experience this quote, attributed to Robin, has been true — that genuine empathy and understanding are so often born of suffering and loss that profoundly mark the soul. 

So much compassion derives from personal pain, and it saddens me that these beautiful qualities come at such cost to the holders. I know what that cost is, and what it takes to hold onto kindness, decency, optimism, love, and resilience when life keeps layering the pain. ❤️

These are some really dark times and also some dark hearts, words, and actions we are witnessing. I’ve heard a number of people refer to the chaos of this period as the last “extinction burst” of an old, rotten, dying way of thinking.

I’ve been hoping that’s true — as naive as that might seem — that this is the last, violent gasp of an entrenched bigotry and a backwardness that deserves to die.
In alchemy, the point at which a blackened substance, through heat and reactivity, develops a white crust and then puffs into a cloud inside the alchemist’s flask is the catharsis. It’s the stage at which future possibilities become apparent as a material is transformed from one to the other. It symbolizes rebirth through turmoil.

I know artists are built for the sometimes traumatizing task of transmuting darkness into light — standing up to and exposing the rottenness for what it is — maybe not by choice but because we’re born into the type of trouble that forces us to find a better way out of distress through creation.

I know, in my own admittedly small way, what it means to lose almost everything materially, to have to march on when it’s demoralizing and exhausting and feeling utterly hopeless. My own philosophy is to keep creating no matter what it takes. Keep painting, keep writing, keep singing, keep seeing the sanctity and sanctuary of everything amazing and gorgeous around us that we stand to both lose and gain. But also refuse to ignore the badness. Fight back as hard as it does.

There was a story years ago about a scientist in San Francisco who lost his hand strength to type. But, he was so driven to keep writing, he rigged a pulley system to support hands above the typewriter.

It’s a powerful form of rebellion to build a pulley, literally or metaphorically. It’s a Grinch-who-store-Christmas kind of thing to say, yeah, you can try to take everything from me, but you can’t have this. I cherish the people on this earth who, through that same stubbornness, transmute suffering into goodness.