We become better at something in ourselves—more skilled, more creative, more effective—when we work. We discover that, indeed, we are good for something. Good work is, at the time, its own kind of asceticism. It needs no symbolic rituals or contrived penances.
The very act of continuing something until we succeed at it is soul-searing, life-changing enough... It makes us equal partners with the rest of the human race in this one common endeavor to grow the globe to wholeness. Good work is our gift to the future. It is what we leave behind—our persistence, our precision, our commitment, our fidelity to the smallest and meanest of tasks that will change the mind of generations to come about our sacred obligation to bear our share of the holy-making enterprise that is work.
Love is who you are, what you have come into life to give. Love is the cooperative, harmonizing, accepting, forgiving essence of your being. Love does not give up nor demand what it does not have. Love doesn't force itself on others in order to feel better about itself. Love doesn't attack to avenge itself nor does love withhold itself. When we learn to see ourselves as love and to be present with others in loving ways, love will be anchored in our consciousness and on the planet.