It’s okay if you’re scared when you’re opening. The seed, she was scared too. Do you think the coal wanted to become a diamond? Ha! She was scared out of her wits of change! It took her 10,000 years to even be able to pray for it. And what about our favourite cliché, that caterpillar?…
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone– and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the…
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to…
I cannot tell you how the light comes. What I know is that it is more ancient than imagining. That it travels across an astounding expanse to reach us. That it loves searching out what is hidden what is lost what is forgotten or in peril or in pain. That it has a fondness for…
If you put your hands on this oar with me, they will never harm another, and they will come to find they hold everything you want. If you put your hands on this oar with me, they would no longer lift anything to your mouth that might wound your precious land – that sacred earth…
Just sit there right now Don’t do a thing. Just rest. For your separation from God is the hardest work in this world. Let me bring you trays of food and something that you like to drink. You can use my soft words as a cushion for your head. Daniel Ladinsky rendition of Hafiz …
And whom do I call my enemy? An enemy must be worthy of engagement. I turn in the direction of the sun and keep walking. It’s the heart that asks the question, not my furious mind. The heart is the smaller cousin of the sun. It sees and knows everything. It hears the gnashing even…
“Which is bigger,” he asks me, “the ocean or sky,” and I want to tell him the heart, which even today has been practicing vastness, is learning to say yes in new languages, learning to stretch beyond the center, beyond the lips, learning to be more moon and less woman, to reflect light without owning…
It was as if a window suddenly blew open and the sky outside the mind came flooding in. My childhood shriveled to a close, thread of smoke that rose and touched a cloud — or the cloud’s replica adrift on the slow river of thinking — and disappeared inside it. In that dark water, a…