François Matarasso

Each of us is a world, an entire planet of knowledge, ideas and experience, accumulated painstakingly from the moment of our first breath until, with the last, the sun dies and another world is gone, irrecoverable, leaving a trace in the memory of shared moments with those who continue, a little further. I know this because I know the worlds I have lost and cannot recover. Each one is an absence, a wound in my own world.

Every day the news reports more deaths in war, in Ukraine, Palestine, Israel, Myanmar, Sudan and many other places. More losses, more worlds extinguished. Mine are small in the scale of this. Others have lost, are losing, entire families, galaxies not worlds, and all for the wicked designs of wicked men. It is an act of faith to hold that we can build new worlds, better worlds, faster than they can destroy existing ones. Have faith.