Quotations

Prayer is easy only for beginners and for those who are already Saints. During all the long years in between, it is difficult. Why? Because prayer has the same inner dynamics as love, and love is sweet only in its initial stage, when we first fall in love, and again in its final, mature stage. In between, love is hard work, dogged fidelity, and needs willful commitment beyond what is normally provided by our emotions and our imagination.

It's when I say, "I don't know how to love," and, "I don't know how to pray," that I first begin to understand what love and prayer actually are.

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your own deepest belonging. One of the lovely things about us as individuals is the incommensurable in us.

In each person, there is a point of absolute nonconnection with everything else and with everyone. This is fascinating and frightening. It means that we cannot continue to seek outside ourselves for things we need from within. The blessings for which we hunger are not to be found in other places or people. These gifts can only be given to you by yourself. They are at home at the hearth of your soul.

One of the dysfunctional patterns of the mind is the assumption that the Now needs to be filled with something all the time.

There's so much you want to say,
but time keeps taking time and all
your words away. How to say—amid
this flood of gratitude and grief—
"Thank you!", or "How beautiful,
how grand!", or "I don't know how
I survived", or "I miss you so," or
"I was changed forever the day
we two joined hands."

As you reach for your last words,
you realize this is it—this ebbing tide
of language called your life, words
trailing into silence, returning to
the source—this unfinished poem
you would have writ, had you not
been awash in wonder, grateful
to be living it.

When you go out into the woods, and you look at trees, you see all these different trees. And some of them are bent. You sort of understand that it didn't get enough light, and so it turned that way. And you don't get all emotional about it. You just allow it.

The minute you get near humans, you lose all that. And you are constantly saying "You are too this, or I'm too this!" That judgment mind comes in. And so I practice turning people into trees. Which means appreciating them just the way they are.

It's said that the journey to God has an end, but the journey in God is endless. All of reality is simply zero blooming into infinity.

To create the world that exemplifies our values, we need to liberate ourselves from enemy images — the thinking that says there is something wrong with the people whose actions or values we don't agree with... Now, that's not easy to do. Why? Because it's hard to believe that those who are doing things far outside of our value system are human beings like the rest of us. It's very challenging.

... we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena ... It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

The world existed.

Before anything else, it was all fire: Golden, molten, radiating, relentlessly bright flame.

Nothing was hidden. But nothing could be seen either, because it would melt the eyes. Even God was nervous to approach the world.

God longed for the dark things. Ash meant everything had burned, but it also meant substance had cooled. God could gaze upon charcoal and see all the folds and tunnels that ran through it, marking a flame's path. God could hold it in the hand, stick it in the pocket, carry it elsewhere.

God said, “Let there be shadows, where I can hide from the light, rest from the day, and cool my sweat." A shadow descended over the place God now sat resting.

God imagined the heat itself could rest. God laughed and clapped. “Yes! I do not want to kill the heat forever, just offer it relief from its relentless work. Let it take on another personality from time to time." God filled a tub with silver movement, with blue sploshing. God called the magic “water," and it was good.

Gently, curiously, slowly, God upturned the tub over the flames whose pulsing screams snuffed into a hissing whimper, a relief, another way to exist.

God stopped and looked around the world as it stood. True, many corners still pulsed with energy and heat, but the harshness of it dimmed because there were ashes to replenish the ground. And there was water to offer to the ashes (imagine what magic might now sprout there!). And there were cool, shadowy corners to nap in. Or, God now considered, where one could invite someone else to sit, too.

Now God longed for “Someone Else." It was a desire even stronger than when God had wanted ashes, or shadows, or water. Out of this great desire — this love — God conjured all the bacteria, the fungi, the plants, the animals, the humans. And the world now hummed: with the pulses, the hisses, the sploshes, the snores, the chatter of it all.

Don't ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.