When you slowly lift your cup, feel the weight of all you’ve gathered from your time on Earth, bring it to your lip and feel the milk you were given as a child, feel the first time you cupped water from a stream, feel the love you drank from that healed you of all that was tangled in your story, feel the warmth you fed your mother or father when they were dying, even feel the snow your dog licks... Read more

Yearning to be, we enter a lifelong process. We follow a thread of connection that reveals itself as a necessary art of being. The unexpected utterance that comes from honest living then helps us lift the veils we encounter. And so, the life of expression helps us keep the world together. This is the purpose of our will, to join the one conversation we all are born to. By seeing one thing in another, we release the Divine Nature in... Read more

No matter what anyone tells you, opinions are shields and questions are windows. And difficulty is there to have us break the crust of bread in half, not hide it. And in the bright space opened by lightning, we can ask each other, “What’s it like to be here? What’s it like to be you?”   A Question to Walk With: In conversation with a friend or trusted loved one, inquiry in all sincerity, asking each other, “What’s it like... Read more

Like a photographer of the invisible, I have spent my life trying to develop images in the dark room of my heart. Trying to give a face to the wind, to give a name to the light, to hold the irrepressible feel of Oneness until it reveals its intricate web of connection. Of course, this is impossible. But this has been my joy: to squeeze water out of clouds to offer you a cup.   A Question to Walk With:... Read more

Remember when we sat in your study by the window, wondering why life is so hard. And just then, the sun, without effort, rushed its way through the clouds across our faces. And the sudden light spilled across all the open books we had around us. Today, I think of you and how a toe in the water is worth all the descriptions of water. And a moment of love is worth all the windows it passes through.   A... Read more

Storms may come, natural and human. And dreams may shatter like glass. And trust may tear like a tent in the rain. The only thing that keeps us here is saying I love you and saying I’m sorry. Until wisdom grows like a root and kindness is its flower.   A Question to Walk With: Tell the story of a recent time when you said I love you and a recent time when you said I’m sorry. How did each... Read more

They had gathered from all over. There was a woman with prosthetic arms. And a surgeon who could barely walk. And a grandmother With one good eye. And a therapist who couldn’t stop trembling. From a distance, we see the broken as less than. Until we break. Then, it’s clear that they are the heroes: crying more easily, listening longer, doing more with less. They are the ones who have been pounded to their beauty. They are the ones to... Read more

Everyone is born into a scene that is not of their choosing. And so begins the initiation between dream and acceptance, to find a way, to run away, only to come home, in yourself and in the world. If blessed, we suffer enough to relinquish blame for those who brought us here. For they were unsure of their own beginnings. It is the hardest journey to shed everything that is not you. And still be thankful, as the tree is... Read more

How do all these forms come out of what is formless and how do they return? The worm, the bird, the drip of dew, the tip of lavender, the cub, the mole, the stingy one, and the one who gives all. The nail and the boards it holds together, the cloud, and the root that keeps going deeper. And the idea we think we have thought, though it arrives like a drop of honey in the center of our mind... Read more

When Chomei, an ancestor to Basho, saw Kyoto burn in 1177, he was crushed, not knowing how to continue. And five hundred years later, when Basho himself saw the pine-covered islands off the coast of Matsushima, he was leveled by its beauty, not knowing how to take that beauty into his life. And when Beethoven heard the opening of the Ninth Symphony flutter into his consciousness like a thousand birds returning home, he trembled, not able to ink the notes... Read more