We can never be prepared for everything. No one person can anticipate all of life. In fact, overpreparation is yet another way to wall ourselves in from life.

No bird can fly without opening its wings, and no one can love without exposing their hearts.

In daily terms, the work of listening is to be constantly worn free of our preconceptions and preferences so that nothing stands in the way of our direct experience of life.

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

The journey is made easier when we can accept that the process of living is designed for what matters to come through us tenderly.

Perhaps the hardest thing I've learned, and still struggle with, is that I don't have to be finished in order to be whole.

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.