> "There's God's side and the other side." --Katt Williams This reminds me of one of my favorite things: > Now I am enjoying the last rays of the sun again, m

> "There's God's side and the other side." --Katt Williams This reminds me of one of my favorite things: > Now I am enjoying the last rays of the sun again, marveling at the incredible beauty of everything that has not been created by man. The red dahlias at the white garden gate, the tall serious fir trees and the trembling golden birches with their now shining trunks in front of all the green and rust-colored foliage, the golden sun that enhances the luminous colorfulness of every single thing instead of, like the glowing summer sun, smothering everything that still wants to move next to it. Everything is so astonishingly beautiful that I do not yet know what kind of feeling my speechless heart should develop for it, for it is not yet mature enough for pure joy; it is amazed and content with delighted astonishment. > Isn't it puzzling enough, and if you don't know the reason for it, almost frightening, that everything is so beautiful? Despite the terrible things that happen. Something great and unknown has intruded into my sheer joy in everything beautiful, namely a sense of its Creator, whom the innocent created creatures praise with their beauty. > Therefore, only man can actually be ugly because he has the free will to separate himself from this song of praise. And now one could often think that he is capable of roaring over this song with the thunder of cannons and cursing and blasphemy. But I realized last spring that he can't, and I will try to side with the victors. -- Sophie Scholl in a letter to her friend Lisa Remppis, October 1942 Of course just boiling it down to "love" is prone to misunderstandings, and bringing up "God" is like whipping out a hand grenade on HN. People with different perspectives read these words differently, and of course we get triggered by the religious fascists it makes us think of; but what can you do. Yet also: > But I have learned that a hard spirit without a soft heart heart must be just as unfruitful as a soft heart without a hard spirit. I believe the sentence comes from Maritain: "Il faut avoir l’esprit dur et le coeur tendre". A word that is not experienced by the soul is a dead word, and a feeling that is not the womb of a thought is in vain. -- Sophie Scholl, January 1942