To be broken is no reason to see all things as broken.

Keeping a commitment to listening has led me to my own growth, beyond any imagined dreams I may have had throughout the years.

No amount of thinking can stop thinking.

But compassion is a deeper thing that waits beyond the tension of choosing sides. Compassion, in practice, does not require us to give up the truth of what we feel or the truth of our reality. Nor does it allow us to minimize the humanity of those who hurt us. Rather, we are asked to know ourselves enough that we can stay open to the truth of others, even when their truth or their inability to live up to their truth has hurt us.

To walk quietly until the miracle in everything speaks is poetry, whether we write it down or not.

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.

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.