We love to pass judgments. He’s good. She’s bad. She’s extra-good. He’s super-bad. I don’t find these classifications to be fruitful or accurate.
Show me a “bad” electron. Where is the bad tree? When a tree’s roots grow in a particular way, they do so for a reason.
People, too, have reasons; we just don’t see them. We are not privileged with access to the intimacy of their consciousness. We cannot see their lives from the inside.
But what if we could? What if we knew—knew exactly—what caused other people to make their choices? The understanding that flows from inhabiting another consciousness is one of the great joys of being a writer.
It is tempting to return wrong for wrong. To send bad energy out when we receive bad energy. But there is another way. Try, just as an experiment, to send good energy out when you feel bad energy come in. See what happens. 
Tomorrow is made from the energy we summon today.
I was in traffic earlier today. There was an absurdly noisy truck beside me, billowing black exhaust, his engine far too loud. He passed me; I passed him; he passed me again. Eventually it dawned on me that I could turn down a side street and be rid of him! A gorgeous, tree-lined side street with a canopy of purple blossoms.
I am free. Yet how often I give away my freedom, or forget that I even possess it.
I respect freedom so much that I do not like to give other people advice. But I will make one exception. Do not let the world—our wonderful, weary world—embitter you. Keep your heart sweet like a strawberry. If you let the cruelty of others harden your heart, no matter how much good happens in your life, you won’t be able to feel it. You will be sitting in Paris at an outdoor café with a whipped-cream latte and a plate of the world’s sweetest peaches, and you won’t be able to taste them.
It’s cliché, yes. But we should try a little tenderness. What if we’re all the same consciousness, playing different roles—all the same ocean, in different cups?
I think: I am Alethea, I was born in 1969. I lived here, I went there, then I did that other thing. I think about the story-line of my life.
But what if I’m wrong? What if my identity is not linear at all? What if my real identity is Now—everything? And your real identity is Now—everything, too? And not just me and you. The moon, the stars, the trees, the peaches. The purple blossoms arching above us. Paris in the late-afternoon light.
Postscript:
“Show me a bad tree”—as I typed those words, I was of course reminded of the passage in scripture where Jesus curses the fig tree. It’s such an odd moment. First, that the Christ would curse anything. Second, that it would be a tree.
Perhaps this, too, was a lesson; we have just been reading it from the wrong direction. To understand it, we have to read it backward: It is the tree that Jesus curses that (on his reverse trip) does not give him any fruit.
I encountered a similarly unusual treatment of time in a mystic’s diary called He and I (Lui et moi)—my favorite book. I don’t have my thumb on the exact passage, but somewhere it says something along these lines: Mary’s heart and her prayers were so fervent and holy that she helped to hasten the birth of Christ.
This confused me. I knew that in order to prepare the way for the Christ, Mary’s conception had been immaculate in her mother, Anne’s, womb. How could her actions reach back and affected her birth?
This would only possible way is if time “runs both ways”—if past, present, and future are all happening at once.
