No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

The sun doesn't stop shining because some people are blind.

All the buried seeds crack open in the dark the instant they surrender to a process they can't see.

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.

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.

I started out wanting to write great poems, then wanting to discover true poems. Now, I want to be the poem.

The practice of listening is one of the most mysterious, luminous, and challenging art forms on Earth.