What will you do today, knowing that you are one of the rarest forms of life to ever walk the Earth? How will you carry yourself? What will you do with your hands? Tomorrow you could die, but today you are precious and rare and awake. Grateful and awake, ask what you need to know now. Say what you feel now. Love what you love now.

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

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.

I have found that life is alive and we are requested to have a friendship with it, to have a conversation with life and that conversation is restorative and healing and always nearby.

We are broken open, or we willfully shed.

Let's be in awe which doesn't mean anything but the courage to gape like fish at the surface breaking around our mouths as we meet the air.

I think happiness is overrated, but joy is the key to the thousands of possible moods we can feel. And when we can rest in that joy, then peace is the moment of openness that holds all feeling.