Today is a day for sober and mature reflection, not glee. Mindless celebration is both spiritually inappropriate and politically naive.

Happiness requires that we give up a worldly orientation-not worldly things, but a worldly attachment to things. We have to surrender all outcomes. We have to live here but appreciate the joke.

When many people think of "new age" they think of crystals and purple decals and ceramic angels in people's windows and a kind of fuzzy thinking - which is abhorrent to a serious person.

Love will push every button, try every faith, challenge every strength, trigger every weakness, mock every value, and then leave you there to die. And then you will be ready to be born at last, to become a soul who is strong enough to take love on. You'll be a romantic mystic who has achieved the elements: you endured the flames of love, you were baptized in the waters of love, and now you can soar like only a mystic can through the skies and skin of a lover's heart.

There are other kinds of emotional pain that emerge from our own mistaken thinking. As we surrender that pain, we are inviting into our thought system a guide who will lead us to different thoughts. It’s like the song “Amazing Grace”: I was blind and now I see.

We need adventure, we need meaning, we need identity. We need love. Someone who has seen us through loving eyes has awakened us from the ranks of the formerly dead. Most people bear the terminal stress of walking the world unseen, a mere number or cog in a lifeless machine.

When a woman rises up in glory, her energy is magnetic and her sense of possibility contagious.