Julian JP Lee

Dear friends,

It is wonderful that you are here.

Your being here is enough.

I am writing to you from Singapore, the city I was born and raised in. The sky is a bright, pure azure, accented with wisps of airy-white.

A flash-storm of thick rain has just eased, and great Yellow Flame Trees standing by the busy tarmac are basking in the afternoon Sun, green, gold and happy.

As I sit here, well-rested and relaxed, I can’t help but gently ponder about all that has happened in my life.

The last I had written to you, around the middle of February, I was in a state of deep grief due to the deterioration of the world at large.

Since then, I’ve rested, sought calm and healing and learnt to “have tea with my grief”, which essentially means listening to where my grief is coming from without being consumed by the emotion completely.

I’ve seen things.

When you’re willing to meet your grief for tea, they will lead you down roads you’d rather run from. Roads of sheer horror. But Grief does not lead us down these dark tunnels out of hatred, but out of love. For these are the truths of grief— the painful realities of life— and Grief walks with us down these midnight paths so that we may face life as it truly is.

What is beautiful is that at the end of these December roads and blood-stained alleys, we return to love, Grief’s hidden heart.

At the depth of my grief, having beheld sorrow upon sorrow, crime upon crime, I’ve realised that my only rational choice left is to love.

Let me leave you with a poem by Naomi Shihab Nye.

My friends, it is good that you are here, trying to live, and love, in this mad world, with me.