Still Sad Music

The world's unhappiest people are those who never permit themselves to be blue. 

We can confess our woundedness. Sadness is not a taboo.

If our enlightenment cannot encompass the shadow, it is not the vastness of Bodhichitta, the embrace of Christ Consciousness, but just another bright mask. In the heart of the secret, in the secret of the heart, darkness is light.

Many of art's most sublime achievements were created from profound melancholy. Who could imagine Beethoven's final piano sonata, Mozart's Requiem, Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings, or "Kind of Blue" without the bittersweet?

We would have no Keats, Dickenson, Basho or Rilke had they not permitted themselves to savor what Wordsworth called "the still sad music of humanity."

A genuine smile, a smile from the heart, has the courage to weep as well.