Accepting what we're given is a practice in being present to everything beyond us that lets us become intimate with the nature of life.

My own time on earth has led me to believe in two powerful instruments that turn experience into love: holding and listening. For every time I have held or been held, every time I have listened or been listened to, experience burns like wood in that eternal fire, and I find myself in the presence of love. This has always been so.

We need to meet, embrace and work with what we're given. For what we want and what we're given often serve two different gods. And how we respond to their meeting determines our path.

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

Part of the blessing and challenge of being human is that we must discover our own true nature.

Four hundred year old trees, who draw aliveness from the earth like smoke from the heart of God, we come, not knowing you will hush our little want to be big; we come, not knowing that all the work is so much busyness of mind; all the worry, so much busyness of heart. As the sun warms anything near, being warms everything still and the great still things that outlast us make us crack like leaves of laurel releasing a fragrance that has always been.

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