I found LOVE. But not just any kind of love. During one of my daily meditations, when tears were flowing down my cheeks as if I had been watching a horror movie, with all my pain, suffering and demons, playing main characters in the story of my life, I had felt an inexplicable warmth in my heart. I felt something that I had never felt before. An unconditional love… for myself. I felt that I was more than just a human being. I felt I was part of the surrounding universe. I was a spirit. And in that moment, I felt as if nothing else had existed or mattered. No worries. No problems. There was no past. There was no future. There was only ME and there was no… suffering any more. No more pain, no more heartbreak. I didn’t need anyone else to love me because I BECAME love. I became who I had always been so desperately searching for, whole as a person. I realised that only when we are whole as a spirit, filled with unconditional love for ourselves, that can we truly find and share an immense love with another human being, the one that is right for us and who is also whole as a person. – from ‘Polish Girl In Pursuit of the English Dream by Monika Wiśniewska
It was almost a mystical experience. I do not know how else to put it. My mind outran time as he neared, and it was as though I had an eternity to ponder the approach of this man who was my brother. His garments were filthy, his face blackened, the stump of his right arm raised, gesturing anywhere. The great beast that he rode was striped, black and red, with a wild red mane and tail. But it really was a horse, and its eyes rolled and there was foam at its mouth and its breathing was painful to hear. I saw then that he wore his blade slung across his back, for its haft protruded high above his right shoulder. Still slowing, eyes fixed upon me, he departed the road, bearing slightly toward my left, jerked the reins once and released them, keeping control of the horse with his knees. His left hand went up in a salute-like movement that passed above his head and seized the hilt of his weapon. It came free without a sound, describing a beautiful arc above him and coming to rest in a lethal position out from his left shoulder and slanting back, like a single wing of dull steel with a minuscule line of edge that gleamed like a filament of mirror. The picture he presented was burned into my mind with a kind of magnificence, a certain splendor that was strangely moving. The blade was a long, scythe like affair that I had seen him use before. Only then we had stood as allies against a mutual foe I had begun to believe unbeatable. Benedict had proved otherwise that night. Now that I saw it raised against me I was overwhelmed with a sense of my own mortality, which I had never experienced before in this fashion. It was as though a layer had been stripped from the world and I had a sudden, full understanding of death itself.
