Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live.

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

I had over twenty years ago damaged the cilia in my ears. This has taught me many things. One thing I learned, paradoxically, is that there is much to be heard in silence.

The things that can restore us have to get in, too. This is what the wisdom of an open heart is all about. All the spiritual traditions speak of this but I love the Tibetan tradition: "A spiritual warrior always has a crack in his heart because that is how the mysteries can get in."

Grief can be a slow ache that never seems to stop rising, yet as we grieve, those we love mysteriously become more and more a part of who we are.

The pain of life is pure salt; no more, no less. The amount of pain in life remains the same, exactly the same. But the amount of bitterness we taste depends on the container we put the pain in. So when you are in pain, the only thing you can do is to enlarge your sense of thingsstop being a glass. Become a lake.

To journey without being changed, is to be a nomad. To change without journeying is to be a chameleon. To journey and to be transformed by the journeying is to be a pilgrim.