Loudly declaring our soul's desire can get the blood running and our passions blazing.

Loudly declaring our soul's desire can get the blood running and our passions blazing.

The world we live in is a co-creation, a manifestation of individual consciousness woven into a collective dream. How we are with each other as individuals, as groups, as nations and tribes, is what shapes that dream.

Within each of us there is the heart of a lion, the courage to simply be who & what we are regardless of others opinions or our own fears. Sometimes this courage has been buried beneath years of shaming that may have been so implicit or insidious that we breathed it in, unaware of how it separated us from knowing our own beauty of being. May we each know our own beauty & right to be today. May we drop down into the heart of the lion within & say to shame, when it rears it's head, "Not today!"

It doesn't interest me how old you are. I want to know if you will risk looking like a fool for love, for your dreams, for the adventure of being alive.

It is hard to be with another's pain if we cannot be with our own. Since I was a child I have always felt a deep sense of responsibility to ease others' pain. But I have discovered that often, beneath this genuine and admirable desire, lies an inability to be with my own sorrow. Several years ago, watching a close friend suffer when a brain aneurysm took away her life as she knew it, I wrote in my journal, "I won't ask much. But if you would just let me save your life, perhaps it will not hurt so much to know I cannot save my own.

What if the question is not why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?