My Heart Restored - Inimă vindecată

      This vast field, full of multicolored flowers — some pleasantly fragrant, others downright foul-smelling — with shapes ever more interesting and alluring: some carnivorous, others as beautiful as they are thorny; some with three petals, some with five or ten; some climbing, others clustered and crowded like at old-fashioned tea dances; some smaller, in the shadow of the bold ones that know how to turn their petals toward the sun… This vast field is full of the unexpected. If you walk among its flowers, you may be caressed, pampered, intoxicated, stung, scratched, tripped, or tickled. You must know which one to pick, at what time in your life, how to care for it to keep it alive, how to multiply it, and how to protect it. Sometimes you wish to see this plain from the height of a mountain, to admire it without being close to it, and you tell yourself that, although there are many weeds among those flowers, the field is nevertheless wonderful, and you hope it will rema...

            If one day we were to discover that Earth would be destroyed within the next 24 hours, and the only chance to stop this end would be to truly love one another — would we succeed? Could we open our hearts, connect deeply, and become, beyond all differences, a single soul? Could we understand that Love, this feeling so simple and yet so powerful, has the strength to heal everything — suffering, deprivation, our deepest wounds? That it could be enough to transform the world and save ourselves? We have not yet risen above our instincts, pride, fear, or the violence within us. Perhaps we are much lower on the scale of evolution than we like to believe. For the true measure of a civilization lies not in its economic progress or technological achievements, but in its capacity to feel for others — in empathy, generosity, and solidarity. The first step toward a truly modern civilization was not an invention, nor a spectacular discovery, but a simple and ...