Quotations

What is the difference
Between your experience of Existence
And that of a saint?
The saint knows
That the spiritual path
Is a sublime chess game with God
And that the Beloved
Has just made such a Fantastic Move
That the saint is now continually
Tripping over Joy
And bursting out in Laughter
And saying, 'I Surrender!'
Whereas, my dear,
I am afraid you still think
You have a thousand serious moves

Sometimes a person wakes
believing they are a storm.
It is hard to deny it, what,
with all the rain pouring out
of the gutters of the mind,
all the gusts blowing through,
all the squalls, all the gray.
But by afternoon, it seems obvious
they are a garden about to sprout.
By night, it is clear they are a moon—
luminous, radiant, faithful.
That's the danger, I suppose,
of believing any frame.
Let me believe, then, in curiosity,
in wonder, in change.
Let me trust how essential it is
to stumble into the trough
of the unknown, marvel how
trough becomes wings becomes
faith becomes math. Let me trust
uncertainty is a sacred path.

We see that it is not the task of Christianity to provide easy answers to every question, but to make us progressively aware of a mystery. God is not so much the object of our knowledge as the cause of our wonder.

My heart is solitary now.
It finds no companionship anywhere
And no wish to find any.

My sole desire is You,
And You are always absent.

Can one love absence so intensely
That even your presence
Seems like an intrusion?

I move around in aimless circles.
Rituals and sacred symbols,
Once treasured symbols of relating to You
Are meaningless to me now.

They communicate nothing of You,
Who are everything to me
But for whom and from whom I feel no love,
Nor hope of fulfillment.

I am as one turned inside out,
And there is nothing there — not You, not me.

If this is union, there is neither two in One,
Nor One without another.

I long to relate to everyone,
Yet lack the capacity to relate to anyone.

There is only your boundless presence,
That treats me like a thing without a heart,
Except perhaps a broken heart.

For the God I thought I knew
No longer exists

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don't really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It's just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.

To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feelings of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.

Biophilia (noun): A hypothetical human tendency to interact or be closely associated with other forms of life in nature: A desire or tendency to commune with nature

Ours is not the task of fixing the entire world all at once, but of stretching out to mend the part of the world that is within our reach. Any small, calm thing that one soul can do to help another soul, to assist some portion of this poor suffering world, will help immensely. It is not given to us to know which acts or by whom, will cause the critical mass to tip toward an enduring good.

Recognizing "enoughness" is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more.

If I can't dance, it's not my revolution.

All words have a history. But some are particularly interesting to explore when it comes to psychology—because they're directly born from it. How many times have you been mesmerized by something, so captured by it that it was like you were in a trance? The word "mesmerize" dates back to an 18th century Austrian physician named Franz Anton Mesmer (1734-1815). He established a theory of illness that involved internal magnetic forces, which he called animal magnetism. (It would later be known as mesmerism.)

Whether a plot in a yard or pots in a window, every politically engaged person should have a garden. By politically engaged, I mean everyone with a vested interest in the direction the people on this planet take in relationship to others. We should all take some time to plant life in the soil. Even when such planting isn't easy.

Beloved Earth, ancient dreamer, keeper of bones and stories—
We, breath in your body, stardust in your veins,
Come before you with hearts both broken and burning.

In this time of the Great Turning,
When despair and possibility dance in the same holy darkness—
May we offer ourselves as imaginal cells in your metamorphosis...

May we be scattered like spores,
Each carrying a fraction of the future,
Each vital, each necessary, each aflame
With particular purpose...

May our courage rise to match the magnitude of these times.

In every moment,
in every event of your life
Wisdom
is whispering to you
exactly what you need to hear and know.

Who can ever explain this miracle?
It simply is.

Listen
and you will discover it
every passing moment.

Listen
and your whole life
will become a conversation
in thought and act between you and
Wisdom,
directly,
wordlessly,
now,
and always.

Let this darkness be a bell tower and you the bell.
As you ring, what batters you
becomes your strength

Making a home in our hearts,
You are our Companion and Friend...

I accompany those who love You,
that I may grow in wisdom;
I enter into the Silence, into the
Eternal Light,
and listen for your gentle Voice.

Over the past centuries, the being of Sophia, or feminine Divine Wisdom, has been emerging from the mists of ancient history...to become a sign and mystery of our times.... wherever we turn, we see traces of her coming—as if tracking the fringes of her mantle as it brushed aside the tangled, sclerotic cobwebs of centuries of cerebration. As she draws near, much that was forgotten is reentering consciousness, not only as memory but also from the future, as possibility. It demands that we rethink who we are, whence we have come, and whither we are going.

Love is the most universal, the most tremendous and the most mystical of cosmic forces. Love is the primal and universal psychic energy. Love is a sacred reserve of energy; it is like the blood of spiritual evolution.

We know [God] in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore.

It is unusual a mailbox chokes you up, and because there are too many probable causes—not for the mailbox: for my being choked up—let me simply tell you it was the phrase affixed in those janky silver sticker letters, usually used for a name or address, a little crooked, the V and W peeling slightly, the phrase itself leaning back, lounging, or maybe almost indiscernibly ascending:
TRAVELERS WELCOME

The older I get, the more convinced I am that the space between people who are trying their best to understand each other is hallowed ground.

In surrender I clear a space in which something new can grow. I place my faith in something larger than me. I trust.

The answer was overwhelmingly consistent: beauty appears when something is completely and absolutely and openly itself.

Where there is separation,
there is pain.
And where there is pain,
there is story.

And where there is story,
there is understanding,
and misunderstanding,
listening
and not listening.

May we — separated peoples, estranged strangers,
unfriended families, divided communities —
turn toward each other,
and turn toward our stories,
with understanding
and listening,
with argument and acceptance,
with challenge, change
and consolation.

Because if God is to be found,
God will be found
in the space
between.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.