None of this means that we turn away from what is: oppression, hatred, fear. We have to look at it all head-on, without fantasy, denial, or selective perception: the brutal as well as the gentle, the ugly as well as the beautiful, the greed as well as the mercy, the death as well as the life. This takes guts, and judgment. But it can be the source of equanimity because we’ve pushed nothing away. We’re ready to take it all in and then move beyond it. So we can let our hearts be broken by the spectacle of cruelty and allow our anger to arise at the evidence of injustice. Yet we can be whole and
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