I am not sure that any sight or sound on earth is as exquisite as the hushed descent of a sky full of snow.
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you.
Good teaching cannot be reduced to technique; good teaching comes from the identity and integrity of the teacher.
Before you tell your life what you intend to do with it, listen for what it intends to do with you. Before you tell your life what truths and values you have decided to live up to, let your life tell you what truths you embody, what values you represent.
Science requires an engagement with the world, a live encounter between the knower and the known.
Disabused of our illusions by much travel and travail, we awaken one day to find that the sacred center is here and now – in every moment of the journey, everywhere in the world around us, and deep within our own hearts.
As I teach, I project the condition of my soul onto my students, my subject, and our way of being together.
The inner life of any great thing will be incomprehensible to me until I develop and deepen an inner life of my own.
Truth-telling by a leader can legitimate truth-telling at every level.
The ancient human question ‘Who am I?’ leads inevitably to the equally important question ‘Whose am I?’ – for there is no self outside of relationship.
I think the pursuit of happiness is the pursuit of reality because illusion never leaves us ultimately happy.
Here, I think, is another clue to finding true self and vocation: we must withdraw the negative projections we make on people and situations – projections that serve mainly to mask our fears about ourselves- and acknowledge and embrace our own liabilities and limits.
Relational trust is built on movements of the human heart such as empathy, commitment, compassion, patience, and the capacity to forgive.
Good teaching comes from good people.
Death in various forms is sometimes comforting, while resurrection and new life can be demanding and threatening. If I lived as if resurrection were real, and allowed myself to die for the sake of a new life, what might I be called upon to do?
How easily we get trapped in that which is not essential – in looking good, winning at competition, gathering power and wealth – when simply being alive is the gift beyond measure.
Authority is granted to people who are perceived as authoring their own words, their own actions, their own lives, rather than playing a scripted role at great remove from their own hearts.
We listen for guidance everywhere except from within.
What passes for political realism may make for lively academic debates. But it often functions, ironically, as a tool of social control, rendering us passive with an analysis that overwhelms and paralyzes us.
The winters will drive you crazy until you learn to get out into them.