Often the instruments of change are not kind or just and the hardest openness of all might be to embrace the change while not wasting your heart fighting the instrument.   The storm is not as important as the path it opens. The mistreatment in one life never as crucial as the clearing it makes in your heart.   This is very difficult to accept. The hammer or cruel one is always short-lived compared to the jewel in the center... Read more

  Masters of stillness, masters of light, who, when cut by something falling, go nowhere and heal, teach me this nowhere,   who, when falling themselves, simply wait to root in another direction, teach me this falling.   Four-hundred-year-old trees, who draw aliveness from the Earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big;   we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of... Read more

When young, it was the first fall from love. It broke me open the way lightning splits a tree. Then, years later, cancer broke me further. This time, it broke me wider the way a flood carves the banks of a narrow stream. Then, having to leave a twenty-year marriage. This broke me the way wind shatters glass. Then, in Africa, it was the anonymous face of a schoolboy beginning his life. This broke me yet again. But this was... Read more

It was a sunny day and I went to the park and sat on a bench. I was one of many coming out from under our rocks to warm and lengthen.   He was two benches down, a gentle older man staring off into the place between things, beyond any simple past, staring into the beginning or the end, it was hard to say.   When he came up our eyes met and he knew I’d seen him journey there... Read more

I often experience the days like someone rowing, and each time I slip an oar below the surface, it disturbs the water. When I’m tired or stunned enough to stop rowing, the water goes clear. In those moments, I can see through to the bottom. It always makes me wonder where I’m going. This is how we live. We need to move through the world, but only when we stop does the world open. We see differently when rowing and... Read more

In the West, we’re eager, even anxious, to choose names for babies before they’re born. In other parts of the world, the naming process unfolds differently. The Yoruba people of southwest Nigeria wait for a child to arrive before considering a name. There’s a need to meet the new being, to keep company with the child, before sensing the name the child carries. After the first three days of life, the infant is brought into a community circle, where the... Read more

Alex is a trial attorney who knows how to be assertive and use the authority of his position. He began as a public defender and his closeness to people under the thumb of authority has always made him fight for the underdog. A few years ago, Alex became obsessed with mountain climbing. After immersing himself for eighteen months, he began taking trips around the world, trying to conquer legendary climbs. Last spring, he traveled to a western province of Mongolia... Read more

I confess and celebrate that the only thing I’ve done longer than teach is to learn. And not very far along it became clear that teaching is learning with others by living into the questions that experience opens. It was in my second year of teaching—high school, then—that this couplet of e.e. cummings appeared in my path: I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance. I’ve tossed this couplet like... Read more

When our beloved dog Mira died, there were those who walked with us, honoring the truth of where we were, no matter what had brought us there. These were the compassionate. And there were those who felt our grief from a distance, though they were puzzled at the depth of our loss, given that she was only a dog. These were the sympathetic. But there were those who thought our heartbreak too wide and deep, and they grew impatient when... Read more