The real challenge is to remember to see clearly when everything's flying around us and we're wrapped up in our [emotional] wounds and traumas.

Even when clouds grow thick, the sun still pours its light earthward.

When we are forced to stop the noise around us and in us, we begin to hear everything that is not us, and this is the beginning of humility and the renewal of our soul's energy; as only by listening to all that is larger than us can we discover and feel our place in the Universe.

My friends are the beings through whom God loves me.

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.

To listen also means to stay in relationship, the central challenge of our time, and this requires us to constantly minimize whatever stands between us and life.

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.