In the life before tears, there are endless plans and we avoid the difficult feelings at all cost, as if grief, pain, and loss are canyons we’ll never climb out of. But, then, one day, while not looking, someone dear dies, or a dream breaks like a plate, and our…

I will never forget your care, how you stared into me the way a painter might peer into a canyon. You saw a great vastness in me, where I felt only a great emptiness. You taught me how to feel that emptiness as the shimmer of being. This is the…

Buddha said the origin of light came from within. The implication is that there is an inner plane of forces that mirrors the elements of the physical world. That as matter is a conduit for fire, water, earth, and wind, our wakeful consciousness is a conduit for the forces of…

It is the simplest of paradoxes: You can’t see what you are in. As soon as you try, you are no longer in it. This is the trap of self-consciousness. You can’t see the ocean when you are in the ocean. You can’t see the bird flying, if you are…

So many thought Monet was making it up, imagining wildly how things might be if God held them closer. But what he did was much braver. Like a human microscope he kept looking and looking as warmth left the trees as waves remade the sea as loss slowed into peace …

When a horse runs, it leaps and touches down by turns. In just this way, our life is always moving between joy and sorrow. Trying to avoid this is its own sorrow, like a mad bird trying to escape the sky. Rather, our call is to help each other rise…

The Japanese monk, Ryokan, returned to his hut in the moon- light to find a frustrated thief. For there was nothing to steal. So, Ryokan offered him his clothes, saying, “You have come such a long way to visit. Take these.” The stunned thief scampered away and Ryokan thought, Poor soul…

The story of Moses carries an archetype that we all must face and live with. Of all his brethren, Moses was closest to God. Indeed, he climbed Mount Sinai to receive the ten commandments and heard God directly. But due to an accident as a child in which his tongue…

As soon as we can walk, we are taught to run. In time, we think we have to catch something out of reach, when, if we let go, time carries us the way a river carries a boat with no oars. If we find our place on the bottom, the…