Power, used well

Power, used well, should be empowering, contagious, and creative. It should be collaborative, enabling, and protective. It should be self-critical, curious, and brave. It should know its own limits and be prepared to risk its own reputation. This kind of power asks questions to which it does not know the answers and listens because in listening is learning, and in learning is life.

You have possibility

What do you have when you don't have a shared name for a place? You have possibility.

Is this a prayer?

I have an interest in the word "you" — the address that intimates use for each other, that yearning we might have, that sense of addressing self, other, Other, the void, the past, the unknown, the deeply known. That word allows me spaciousness without definition, and I like it, so I regularly repeat the word "you", in Irish, with the in and out of breath, until I've forgotten who is speaking and who is being addressed. ("The eye with which I see God / is the eye with which I see myself", my bewildering friend Meister Eckhart says.)

A prayer for reconciliation

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.