There is nowhere to go. What you are looking for is right here. Open the fist clenched in wanting and see what you already hold in your hand

Tell me, can you see beauty? Can you let it renew your commitment to life, every day? I don't want to wait for death to be near to receive the beauty in my life. I want to be awed every day by the truth-pretty or painful-and let it open me to the beauty that surrounds me and draws me deeper and deeper into my own life.

What if becoming who and what we truly are happens not through striving and trying but by recognizing and receiving the people and places and practices that offer us the warmth of encouragement we need to unfold?

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?

Sometimes I think there are only two instructions we need to follow to develop and deepen our spiritual life: slow down and let go.

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.

I want to know if you have touched the center of your own sorrow, if you have been opened by life’s betrayals or have become shriveled and closed from fear of further pain!