The Greek playwright Aeschylus said, “We suffer into knowledge.” As if knowledge is the fruit that grows inside the hard case of living. And so we must help each other harvest meaning from our suffering in doses we can bear.
The word dose comes from the Greek dosis, meaning gift, and refers to a small amount of medicine or healing. One way to endure the unexpected roughness of life is to nurse each other with small amounts of meaning, beauty, truth, and love. When we can help each other face the rigors of living with small doses of what matters, we participate in a complex yoga of the heart that lets us know our strength and lineage.
Michelangelo believed that the statue was waiting complete in the uncut marble. The sculptor would carve away the excess to reveal the statue hidden in the stone. In the same way, we are shaped by life and experience, which reveals our living beauty.
Sometimes, we’re carved so harshly, we’re damaged or even killed by the sheer force of life trying to release us. Most of the time, we’re revealed slowly, given our lessons in doses we can bear, the way sap oozes from a maple tree in time to be collected.
~Mark Nepo
this how-to guide to living well….
inquiry for today~ and you too, may offer peace…
Storms make trees take deeper roots.
~Dolly Parton
Make Believe Boutique 
Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon
“He who learns must suffer.
And even in our sleep,
pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart,
and in our own despair,
against our will,
comes wisdom to us
by the awful grace of God.”