______________   Receiving depends on gentleness, which relaxes our boundaries. It lets us interact with what comes our way. It lets us lend some of our shape to what’s before us. Lending our shape in this way allows for a momentary joining, through which we can feel the aliveness that flows between things. Here is a mythic example of gentleness.   Gentleness   This is the story of a blind boy who in a dream is told that bowing will... Read more

______________ This passage speaks to the turning points of resilience that are always near. Aslan and the White Witch We always have the choice to be one who affirms or one who drains. This choice is beautifully rendered in the C.S. Lewis classic, The Chronicles of Narnia. There, Aslan, the life-affirming, mystical lion, appears from time to time to restore balance and empower others. His counterpart, the life-draining White Witch of Narnia, freezes the life out of others, turning them... Read more

______________   This passage explores a different sense of destiny.   A Dream We’re Close to Living I was given an insight when young, which arrived one day in the rain as everything thirsty in me relaxed. It was an insight about destiny and how, like trees and plants, destiny is more a breaking ground of all that grows within—a manifestation of life from seed to flower—than a foretold timeline of projected desires that we create to keep us from... Read more

From the outside, being courageous seems a monumental canyon to cross, but inside the opened depth of any situation, it begins with a single step.   The Practice of Courage The practice of courage is doing small things with love. This was Mother Theresa’s anthem. We begin to dismantle what is overwhelming by beginning the journey of involvement one hand at a time, one kindness at a time, one utterance of truth at a time. From the outside, things that... Read more

Since we’re each a living part in a living Whole, one challenging art in being human is to live out our particular life while comprehending the Whole.One aspect of the endless practice is to feel both the depth of our feelings and, at the same time, to stand on the ground of all being which exists independent of what happens to us. Here’s a personal example.   Being the Part, Feeling the Whole During the last eight months of my... Read more

In the face of this gritty, mysterious, and ever-changing dynamic we call being alive, it’s nothing short of heroic that we are asked to choose life and living, again and again. Not just to put a good face on things while we’re here, but because saying yes to life is how the worm inches its way through earth. It’s how salmon leap their way upstream. It’s how flowers grow out of stone. But how do we do this?   Saying... Read more

This fall, Atria is publishing my new book of spiritual inquiry, The Endless Practice: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be. It’s a journey that explores the difficult and rewarding aspects of being human, which are often inter-related, including how to restore our trust in life, when suffering makes us lose our way; how to begin the work of saying yes to life, so it can enliven us; and how to make our inwardness a resource and not a refuge.... Read more

This fall, Atria is publishing my new book of spiritual inquiry, The Endless Practice: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be. It’s a journey that explores the difficult and rewarding aspects of being human, which are often inter-related, including how to restore our trust in life, when suffering makes us lose our way; how to begin the work of saying yes to life, so it can enliven us; and how to make our inwardness a resource and not a refuge.... Read more

This fall, Atria is publishing my new book of spiritual inquiry, The Endless Practice: Becoming Who You Were Born to Be. It’s a journey that explores the difficult and rewarding aspects of being human, which are often inter-related, including how to restore our trust in life, when suffering makes us lose our way; how to begin the work of saying yes to life, so it can enliven us; and how to make our inwardness a resource and not a refuge.... Read more

______________ This fall, Sounds True is publishing a box set of teaching conversations based on the poems in my book Reduced to Joy. The poems are the teachers and unfold the journey from our head to our heart. For the next two months, I’m happy to be previewing poems and reflections from the box set. For all the ways we run and work, the secret waits hiding in the open under all our busyness. One String I am so busy... Read more