"Seek patience and passion in equal amounts. Patience alone will not build the temple. Passion alone will destroy its walls." -Maya Angelou

While listening to a podcast on patience this morning, I found the following to be very interesting (from Zencast, August 12, 2012 speaker: Andrea Fella):

"There is an aspect of patience that is related to a tolerance of difficulty: patience under insult, sometimes it's said. So this kind of patience can have an active quality to it. Martin Luther King spoke so beautifully of this kind of patience and how it relates to love. Here is an excerpt from his famous 1963 speech about the philosophy of love:"

"There's another thing about this philosophy that says you can stand before an unjust system and resist it with all your might, and yet maintain an attitude of active goodwill toward the perpetrators of that unjust system. The ethic of love can stand at the center of the non-violent movement.

Theologians would say that this is the love of God operating in the human heart. When one rises to love on this level, he loves every man. He rises to the point of loving the person who does the evil deed while hating the deed that that person does. I believe this is the kind of love that can carry us through this period of transition.

So in many instances we have been able to stand before the most violent opponents and say in substance: we will meet your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. Throw us in jail and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and as difficult as that is, we shall still love you. 

But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And one day we will win freedom. And we will not only win freedom for ourselves, but we will appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."

Living freely... and patiently,
Carl