Quotations

Before you know what kindness really is
you must lose things,
feel the future dissolve in a moment
like salt in a weakened broth.
What you held in your hand,
what you counted and carefully saved,
all this must go so you know
how desolate the landscape can be
between the regions of kindness...

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to gaze at bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.

[Art] is necessary so that we can be challenged out of our siloed ways of thinking and working, and by extension our understanding of how change occurs...

We can understand art as a process of bringing something into the world that was not there before, it can be an artifact but it can also be an idea. That process, Professor Elaine Scarry calls a fragment of world alteration, and so if we can alter the world in fragments, she says, "just think what can be imagined together, what might be possible in community: a total reinvention of the world."

For things to reveal themselves to us, we need to be ready to abandon our views about them.

...I am telling stories, not writing prescriptions.

What do you have when you don't have a shared name for a place? You have possibility.

There are mountains for climbing, journeys to take, dreams that are hopeful, decisions to make. Dark days may shake us, and worries creep in. With dragons to duel and battles to win. Thunder will rumble. Lightning will flash. The wind will start blowing, and tall waves will crash. But...there are footsteps to follow and words that are wise. There's a map thact will guide us when troubles arise.

Be someone's cardinal glimpsed between leaf-shadows,
flit of brightness so startling they have to blink
to believe their eyes. Be the reason someone looks up
from the cracked blankness of concrete and remembers
the world is so much larger than what's locked inside
head and heart. Be the red swoop from free to tree,
the thread that stitches one uncertain moment to the next.

The Sun said to the Clouds, "Remember when we used to be together all the time and make rainbows?"

The Clouds nodded. "I'm sorry for going clap bang boom! at you," said the Clouds.

"I'm sorry for going sizzle sizzle sizzle! at you," said the Sun.

"It's better being friends!" said the Sun, and the Clouds agreed. They hugged. The Sun shined brightly and the Clouds misted happy rain. Ever so slowly, rainbows reappeared near and far, turning the world colorful once again.

I too have known loneliness.
I too have known what it is to feel
misunderstood,
rejected, and suddenly
not at all beautiful.
Oh, mother earth,
your comfort is great, your arms never withhold.
It has saved my life to know this.
Your rivers flowing, your roses opening in the morning.
Oh, motions of tenderness!

What do we call visible light? We call it color. But the electromagnetic spectrum runs to zero in one direction and infinity in the other, so really, children, mathematically, all of light is invisible.

We do not become fully human until we give ourselves to each other in love.

One little bee peeks out to see
A world of grey and snow.
She's looking for bright colors.
And she needs you to help them grow.

All winter
the blue heron
slept among the horses.
I do not know
the custom of herons,
do not know
if the solitary habit
is their way,
or if he listened for
some missing one-
not knowing even
that was what he did-
in the blowing
sounds in the dark.
I know that
hope is the hardest
love we carry.
He slept
with his long neck
folded, like a letter
put away.

Clearly hopelessness has at least as much to do with what we bring to life as it does with what life brings to us... The challenge of hopelessness is the challenge to re-enter the human race, to take our part in it knowing that it is as much our responsibility to shape life as it is for life to shape us...Hopelessness calls us beyond quitting what we cannot quit, to learn how to do what we have been born to do. Even if this means doing one thing while waiting to do another.

Hope's home is at the innermost point in us, and in all things. It is a quality of aliveness. It does not come at the end, as the feeling that results from a happy outcome. Rather, it lies at the beginning, as a pulse of truth that sends us forth. When our innermost being is attuned to this pulse it will send us forth in hope, regardless of the physical circumstances of our lives. Hope fills us with the strength to stay present, to abide in the flow of the Mercy no matter what outer storms assail us. It is entered always and only through surrender; that is, through the willingness to let go of everything we are presently clinging to. And yet when we enter it, it enters us and fills us with its own life — a quiet strength beyond anything we have ever known.

To get up each morning with the resolve to be happy ... is to condition circumstance instead of being conditioned by them.

There is not enough darkness in all the world to put out the light of one small candle... In moments of discouragement, defeat or even despair, there are always certain things to cling to. Little things usually: remembered laughter, the face of a sleeping child, a tree in the wind – in fact, any reminder of something deeply felt or dearly loved. None is so poor as not to have many of these small candles. When they are lighted, darkness goes away and a touch of wonder remains.

Anyone who has probed the inner life, who has sat in silence long enough to experience the stillness of the mind behind its apparent noise is faced with a mystery. Apart from all the outer attractions of life in the world, there exists at the center of human consciousness something quite satisfying and beautiful in itself, a beauty without features. The mystery is not so much that these two dimensions exist – an outer world and the mystery of the inner world – but that we are suspended between them, as a space in which both worlds meet ... as if the human a is the meeting point, the threshold between two worlds.

Days pass and the years vanish and we walk sightless among miracles. O Holy One, fill our eyes with seeing and our minds with knowing. Let there be moments when your presence, like lightning, illumines the darkness in which we walk... And we will exclaim in wonder, "How filled with awe is this place and we did not know it."

Hope is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –
And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm ...

It is not easy, in these lives haunted by loneliness and loss, menaced by war and heartbreak, witness to genocides and commonplace cruelties, to live in gratitude. And yet it may be the only thing that saves us from mere survival. In these blamethirsty times, to praise is an act of courage and resistance. To insist on what is beautiful without turning away from the broken. To bless what is simply for being, knowing that none of it had to be.

I have an interest in the word "you" — the address that intimates use for each other, that yearning we might have, that sense of addressing self, other, Other, the void, the past, the unknown, the deeply known. That word allows me spaciousness without definition, and I like it, so I regularly repeat the word "you", in Irish, with the in and out of breath, until I've forgotten who is speaking and who is being addressed. ("The eye with which I see God / is the eye with which I see myself", my bewildering friend Meister Eckhart says.)

Is this a prayer? Sure. Is it a prayer? Why not? Is it a prayer? No. Is it? Yes. Too many years of theological study have immunized me from any interest in definitions that ask the impossible of the intellect. I'm interested in practices and signposts to the present. And breath is such a signpost, such a practice, and such an infinity.

What do we do with suffering? As far as I can see, we have two choices — we either transform our suffering into something else, or we hold on to it, and eventually pass it on.

In order to transform our pain, we must acknowledge that all people suffer. By understanding that suffering is the universal unifying force, we can see people more compassionately, and this goes some way toward helping us forgive the world and ourselves. By acting compassionately, we reduce the world's net suffering and defiantly rehabilitate the world. It is an alchemical act that transforms pain into beauty. This is good. This is beautiful.

To not transform our suffering and instead transmit our pain to others,...compounds the world's suffering. Most sin is simply one person's suffering passed on to another. This is not good. This is not beautiful.

The utility of suffering, then, is the opportunity it affords us to become better human beings. It is the engine of our redemption.

Awake at night
while others sleep
I watch meteors fall

in glittering array,
inscrutable patterns.
Multiple fiery tails
each minute

brush the cold black
sky, sweep the cave
of my heart.

I cannot decipher the
hieroglyph of meteors,
except one passage
repeated, descending:

In zero g, space fragments
drift, invisible to human eyes.
But mesmerized by gravity,
meteors burst through
Earth's atmosphere and blaze
a firetrail across the sky:

It takes unbearable friction
and the annihilating fall
to ignite their glory light