My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.

Meditation, in all its forms and traditions, is an invitation to listen, to open, to quietly enlist the courage to be touched and formed by life.

Tragedy stays alive by feeling what's been done to us, while peace comes alive by living with the results.

The greatest thing we can do to be closer to our own lives and to the freshness of living is to open up again.

Four hundred year old trees, who draw aliveness from the earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big; we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of mind; all the worry, so much busyness of heart. As the sun warms anything near, being warms everything still and the great still things that outlast us make us crack like leaves of laurel releasing a fragrance that has always been.

Each of us is born with an incorruptible spot of grace.

Just opening quietly for moments everyday can create a path by which life can reach us, the way rain carves a little stream in the earth by which the smallest flowers are watered.