Grieving allows us to heal, to remember with love rather than pain. It is a sorting process. One by one you let go of the things that are gone and you mourn for them. One by one you take hold of the things that have become a part of who you are and build again.
When you listen generously to people they can hear the truth in themselves, often for the first time.
We are all born to be a blessing.
The choice people have to make is never between slavery and freedom. We will always have to choose between slavery and the unknown.
A blessing is not something that one person gives another. A blessing is a moment of meeting, a certain kind of relationship in which both people involved remember and acknowledge their true nature and worth, and strengthen what is whole in one another.
It has been said that sometimes we need a story more than food in order to live. p 374.
Perhaps wisdom is simply a matter of waiting, and healing a question of time. And anything good you’ve ever been given is yours forever.
When we know ourselves to be connected to all others, acting compassionately is simply the natural thing to do.
What we do to survive is often different from what we may need to do in order to live.
My sense is that you can never teach anybody anything, or change anybody in ways that they don’t already have in mind.
In our instinctive attachments, our fear of change, and our wish for certainty and permanence, we may undercut the impermanence which is our greatest strength, our most fundamental identity. Without impermanence, there is no process. The nature of life is change. All hope is based on process.
Those who bless and serve life find a place of belonging and strength, a refuge.
Life is known only by those who have found a way to be comfortable with change and the unknown. Given the nature of life, there may be no security, but only adventure.
Our wounds are our sources of growth.
If you carry someone else’s fears and live by someone else’s values, you may find that you have lived their lives.
Sooner or later we will come to the edge of all that we can control and find life, waiting there for us.
From a good teacher you may learn the secret of listening. You will never learn the secret of life. You will have to listen for yourself.
When we are seen by the heart we are seen for who we are. We are valued in our uniqueness by those who are able to see us in this way and we become able to know and value ourselves.
Of course love is never earned. It is a grace we give one another. Anything we need to earn is only approval.
The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage.