The great French Impressionist painter Renoir, right at the end of his very long life, said to a friend, "I am just now learning to paint." Renoir carried his gift with a humility which realized how much he still had to learn. Anyone who goes deeply into a field in life and realizes this, gains a sense of proportion that can only make you humble.

When we fall utterly, something gathers us up. But our falling must be without reservation, without expectation, without hope, though not hopeless. You cant plan that kind of falling. When you abandon yourself utterly to life, the river will flow, and the log jam will free. Impossible is another word for grace. Who wouldve thought it, life takes another turn, and you are gathered up into a whole different way of seeing and being.

It is from that region of silence, that wordless knowing comes.

The love of someone else is more accessible or more possible if one lives with a sense of loving embrace towards oneself because that extends out into the world.

I live in California, where there's a lot of driving entailed. I'm usually going somewhere to be on time to meet someone so I'm necessarily engaged in time. And yet, how can I in that moment of driving my car, be aware of that which is not going anywhere?

This question of love begins and ends with the willingness to be welcoming to one's own experience as a loving action towards oneself. It may be dark, it may be light, it may be joyous, it may be sorrowful, but it's your experience, and therefore, your life. As we have that kind of loving response towards our own life, then life itself in terms of the outside world, begins to feel different.

We live in an age of knowledge, with the great god Google, that we can refer to at any time on any subject.