Rather than finding heaven on earth, we are asked to release heaven by living on earth.

We are broken open, or we willfully shed.

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.

Live loud enough in your heart and there is no need to speak.

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.

When we heal ourselves, we heal the world.

For being human, we remember and forget. We stray and return, fall down and get up, and cling and let go, again and again. But it is this straying and returning that makes life interesting, this clinging and letting go - damned as it is - that exercises the heart.