Embracing the New Year

We received this from a Common Tables member in Paksitan early in the morning on New Years Eve Day:

"My dear friends, Salaam alaykum! As this year draws to a close - some might say ignominiously so for us here in Pakistan - I wanted to reach out and share with you in the spirit of heartfelt brotherhood a prayer for a more peaceful 2008; for greater understanding, tolerance, compassion and firmness in the face of blind destructive forces; for more sweetness of inhabiting the life-suckling waters of inner stillness; for more joy in seeing and tasting that though we are indeed in this world, our essential substance is other-worldly - glorious, luminous and eternal."