The deep irony of my life as a teacher is that I travel all over to affirm that there’s nowhere to go but here. And I’m happy to do it. For every place we arrive at unravels to the same timeless moment in which we are each other. This is the path of lasting friendship: trying to go somewhere, only to land in each other’s arms. The harder we try to run from ourselves, the more certain it is that... Read more

  When not doing well, when full of doubt or pain or worry, when unable to find your way, try, very slowly, to return to moments that feel foundational. By foundational, I mean moments that are solid, however briefly, in which you feel directly connected to life, in which you feel safe and thorough, in which you feel at peace, even if for a few seconds. You don’t have to name these foundational moments, or explain them, or fit them... Read more

  I know you can only see red right now through the cut in your trust. But most cuts mend and then, the courage is in finding an open boat so you can row far enough out that you can drift. And only when you have given up going anywhere might you be drawn to pick up the oars and start rowing at the pace of clouds. Then, as your hand is one with the oar and the oar is... Read more

No matter how many conversations I start, they all end with me kneeling at the same deep well. And drinking there, I remember who I am. I rise from that drinking able to see, again, that we are at heart the same. And the secret wound you show me there is my wound which I have hidden for so long. And the secret joy you bring into the open is my joy which I thought I had lost. Experience has... Read more

In the way that erosion makes every face in nature more elemental, everything we go through only makes us more real. Once we give up our masks and excuses, we are humbled to accept the tenderness of having nothing between us and this thing we call life. It is this fragile, resilient state that lets us breathe more deeply, that lets us hear what love has to say, that lets us experience Oneness over the idea of Oneness. The more... Read more

Now that we can’t touch, I am awash with all the ways that touch sustains us: like an electricity from one heart to another or the ancient rush of water down a falls into the basin of a village. I’m thinking of how you wiped my brow in the hospital and the time you stroked a fallen bird, its beak aquiver, and the time your mother held your face, saying, “I saw how loving you are the day you were... Read more

Like everyone, I was taught that justice is blind, then given a scale to weigh and measure everything. Then, I was told on the sly that everyone peeks and puts their finger on the scale. And years later, after tumbling through the labyrinth of almost dying and waking up, I chanced upon the words of a man who lived fifteen hundred years ago who said that the urge in us to save a child from falling in a well is... Read more

Sometimes, after she falls and before she gets up, she takes a deep breath. And in those moments, she stares briefly into the Center of Things. It calms her. For in those moments, she drinks from something older than her life. Other times, the same thing happens when reading a passage from a book that opens her heart. Or when hearing that lift in a song that makes her think of looking at the stars as a little girl. She... Read more