Accepting what we’re given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.
In a world that lives like a fist mercy is not more than waking with your hands open.
To distance ourselves from our experience makes our feelings a liability, while staying in conversation with our experience makes our feelings a resource.
Let’s be in awe which doesn’t mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.
Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.
Whatever truth we feel compelled to withhold, no matter how unthinkable it is to imagine ourselves telling it, not to is a way of spiritually holding our breath. You can only do it for so long.
Love and grief enable us to feel how we’re all at heart the same. In love and grief, which is always very personal, the distinctions that separate us melt away.
All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can’t see.
Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.
My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.
When the sweet ache of being alive, lodged between who you are and who you will be, is awakened, befriend this moment. It will guide you. Its sweetness is what holds you. Its ache is what moves you on.
The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I’ve had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I’ve had to lean into all I don’t understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.
I would rather be fooled than not believe.
We need to give up what no longer works and find new ways of being that keeps us close to what matters.
The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.
For though we stubbornly cling, believing in our moment of hunger that there is no other possibility of love, we only have to let go of what we want so badly and our life will unfold. For love is everywhere.
If you truly hold a stone, you can feel the mountain it came from.
Before we can count we are taught to be grateful for what others do. As we are broken open by our experience, we begin to be grateful for what is, and if we live long enough and deep enough and authentically enough, gratitude becomes a way of life.
We’re quietly aching for something to celebrate.
A successful creative expression is one in which the person who has expressed it was transformed for having encountered it.