Be avid. Create apart from perfection. Risk failure. Cover your words with sweat. Run a little Touch excruciatingly. Laugh until you cry. Dance with your eyes closed. Care. Understand you die a little in every moment. Be Enlivened

The holiday season promotes a heightened sense of community. It draws our chins up and helps us look above and over the limiting fence of our own events, activities and preoccupations. The opportunity for a heroic gesture can tap you quietly on the shoulder in the midst of a holiday bustle. If you are attentive, you will notice the gentle touch and will be able to respond. Remember... There are no small acts of kindness. Every compassionate act makes large the world.

I confessed recently to an old friend, "I realized I was looking at you, in your visit, through old glasses. Speaking old words. Telling old stories. I realize that in my life I've made so many physical changes and I need to give my spirit time to catch up." Time for my spirit to look at my friend through the new glasses of current life experiences. Old friends are precious. They become even more treasured when they are wrapped in the currentness of life experiences and not relegated to the past in which they once lived.

I rest in the light of forgiveness.

It takes courage to reinvent joys, to reinvent opportunities, to reinvent dreams, to reinvent connections, to reinvent hopes that you have set aside.

I recognize this in my writing process. A consistent writing structure opens the door to amazing insights. I recognize the truth of this in my daily habits. When I set my keys in the place I, with practice, always set my keys... I do not lose them. In many instances an ordered external structure can be an invitation for an extraordinarily unfettered, creative and unbounded inner structure.

Go ahead. Weep for the rare, the never seen this way again, the excruciating, ineffable, unmitigated beauty of love.