For a long time, I misunderstood the nature of acceptance. I believed it implied consent, that, if I accepted something, I was automatically saying it’s okay.

I don’t believe that anymore. I think acceptance can be a powerful doorway to change, if we let it. I say this as the people of Palestine are being slaughtered and famished by the State of Israel. So many have died already without even the dignity of a burial. So many might never be found underneath the rubble of Gaza.

For a long time, I couldn’t accept that I now belong to a generation of people who are watching a genocide on live TV. No no no, I kept thinking, all the while remembering that the Srebrenica massacre or the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda also happened before an international audience, with no intervention to stop the unimaginable violence.

So, I’ve been trying, day after day, to accept the unacceptable.

There is something inside acceptance that is intimately tied to leaving behind naïve ideas of good and evil. We are asked to make a leap and say, yes, humans truly are capable of such acts. I wish it weren’t so, but it is. I’m human too. Where does that leave me?

I want to say: it leaves me resisting. It leaves me a fiercer advocate for peace and liberation. It leaves me tender and often frightened. I want to say: there are perhaps no words yet for where it leaves me, where it leaves all of us.

I’ve chosen a woodcut from German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867 -1945) to illustrate all this because she expresses this pain of being human so well. Kollwitz’ own son, Peter, didn’t survive the battlefields of World War I. Despite this loss, Kollwitz didn’t join in the growing pro-war movement forming in Germany in the early 1920s. Instead, using the visual language from war-propaganda, she created a series of anti-war posters. A woodcut to say: remember how fragile we are. In the years to come, Kollwitz would witness Germany’s plunge into fascism and the start of another World War. She couldn’t stop those horrors. But in her careful black lines we see a woman’s raw grief, something no blind desire for revenge or fascist regime can ever touch. We see an artist say I am paying attention.

Today, there is a Full Moon in Scorpio. Of all the twelve signs, Scorpio is the one most associated with death and rebirth. And although every full moon brings with it a sense of release, culmination or intensity, if it’s in Scorpio, you cannot miss it. This is a moment of catharsis, letting go. Maybe for you personally, maybe for someone else. It is as good a time as any to practice accepting the unacceptable, to face whatever it is you think you cannot face. Look at it. Let yourself grieve. Let yourself be changed by what you see.