The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.

Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.

We are not here to fit in...we are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being...we are here to become more and more ourselves.

One of the most powerful shocks of the Middle Passage is the collapse of our tacit contract with the universe-the assumption that if we act correctly, if we are of good heart and good intentions, things will work out. We assume a reciprocity with the universe. If we do our part, the universe will comply. Many ancient stories, including the Book of Job, painfully reveal the fact that there is no such contract, and everyone who goes through the Middle Passage is made aware of it.

The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.

Anger is generally seen as an unwelcome presence in our midst, however natural it may be. Although each person, and each society, is charged with how anger is to be appropriately channeled, the denial of anger, or its continuous repression, is a deep source of our psychopathology and will invariably seek its expression in a less healthful fashion.

Destiny commands... and imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a normal, casual life... there are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the dimmest of understandings.