6. The strangest, most generous, and proudest of all virtues is true courage.

1. The ability to do something that frightens one.
2. Strength in the face of pain or grief.

April is many things, but it is certainly a month of suicides. We don't speak of it. Only of the thaw, the showers that bring May flowers, the new sun and the returning birds, the first buds, forsythia. Tender green life is breaking through the hardened crust. We speak of promise and hope.

April is also a sudden harsh light that interrupts a long sleep. Some wake disoriented, lethargic, stiff, with weak limbs and a cold heavy dread at the prospect of how much it's going to take to rise and shine. With just enough energy to act.

....................

What is courage in love?
The courage to accept you exactly as you are.
Work on that.
The courage to let go of the outcome and do what your heart says.
To fall...
Geronimo!
Bahala Na!
Hoka-hey!
Banzai!
Inshalla!
Fuck it.

Let go.
....................

Ready to fight, ready to kill, ready to die but never will. 

Eighteen years old. Seventy-two of us chanted this in our boxer shorts before retiring for the night for three months and a week. A courage maker. A horror buster. It wasn't one hundred percent effective. Some of us died later.

Then, courage manifested in visible spontaneous ways. The drill instructors frequently "thrashed" us individually and in groups of various sizes on the quarter deck. To be thrashed was to be engaged in intensively supervised, enthusiastically directed, vigorous physical exercise until one collapsed in a state of temporary muscle failure and a lake  of sweat. Make-a-lake was actually one of the short-hand commands they used. We made plenty of them.

Often, a recruit would be having a very bad time of it - maybe he vomited, or couldn't continue, but the drill instructors kept dogging him, maybe he was breaking down. Once in a while, another recruit would run up there uninvited and start getting down with him - doing the same exercises, suffering the same treatment - trying to transfuse his friend with motivation and energy.

Mountain climbers, push-ups (down, up, down, up, down-up, down-up, down-up, down-up), bends and thrusts, sit-ups, Oh! Oh! THAT'S RIGHT - TAKE YOUR TIME, KEEP TAKING YOUR DOGGONE TIME,  mountain climbers, bends and thrusts, FASTER, side straddle hops,  on your back, run in place, on your stomach, push-ups (down-up, down-up, down-up), HURRY UP!  mountain climbers (one-two, one-two, one-two) FASTER...

This phenomenon virtually never occurred in the beginning of recruit training, but by the end it was common place. That spark - both in the giving and in the receiving - was courage. It was clear and something you could feel in your body.

Courage seems now a lonely thing, a strange thing. It's practiced in solitude. Some continue on and some stop. Some open their hearts and some wall them off. Mostly, there's ambivalence. We are sometimes judged by others as cowards or heroes, but most of the time our struggle, our courage, goes unseen and unsung.

April is a hard and beautiful month. It gives gently, and it takes.