In a world that lives like a fist mercy is not more than waking with your hands open.

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.

We think that accomplishing things will complete us, when it is experiencing life that will.

There is no getting around the fundamental fact that we need to interact with everything in order to manifest the wholeness we are born with.

We tend to make the thing in the way the way.

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."

Try as we do to resist what we're given, this is the only doorway to truth. We waste too much time and energy denying or fighting where we find ourselves.