In a world where the great technologies enable us to record, replay, cut and paste, zoom in, and delete, listening is the crucial commitment to keep the heart touchable.

Perhaps the noblest private act is the unheralded effort to ... open our hearts once they've closed, to open our souls once they've shied away.

A love astounds us or a pain consumes us and we forget that we glow on our own.

Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.

Whatever opens us is not as important as what it opens.

The paradox is that we have this amazing capacity in our minds and hearts to learn and gain insights and then to build a kind of personal storehouse of knowledge. The underside is that those insights harden and fill the spaces in our hearts and minds. They become assumptions, conclusions and judgments.

The many ways to listen have been reaching into me for years. To enter deep listening, I've had to learn how to keep emptying and opening, how to keep beginning. I've had to lean into all I don't understand, accepting that I am changed by what I hear.