This is the ongoing purpose of full attention: to find a thousand ways to be pierced into wholeness.

To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.

Even if one glimpses God, there are cuts and splinters and burns along the way.

Everything in life opens and closes, sheds and renews. We are no different. Listening in its endless forms is the way we stay open, the way we stay in relationship, the way we refresh who we are and what we're doing here.

Through the opened heart, the world comes rushing in, the way oceans fill the smallest hole along the shore. It is the quietest sort of miracle: by simply being who we are, the world will come to fill us, to cleanse us, to baptize us, again and again.

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

In truth, the more we lean into life, the more we authentically interact with the world, the brighter our flame.