There has always been a part of me that saw wilderness and risk-taking as the path to freedom.

You come to love not by discovering the ideal individual, yet by figuring out how to see a blemished individual flawlessly.

The sense of gratitude produces true spiritual alchemy, makes us magnanimous - large souled.

The telling of your stories is a revolutionary act.

We [people] may enjoy this fleeting beauty [of life] for such a brief instance. And then we are compost. G - , the creator-destroyer, certainly has a strange sense of humor!

As a mode of perception that often becomes a style of life, paranoia weaves around the vulnerable self or group an air-tight metaphysic and world view. Paranoia is an antireligious mysticism based on the feeling or perception that the world in general, and others in particular, are against me or us. Reality is perceived as hostile. By contrast, the religious mystic experiences the ground of being as basically friendly to the deepest needs of the self. That which is unknown, strange, or beyond our comprehension is with and for rather than against us.

In the degree that we remember and retell our stories and create new ones we become the authors, the authorities, of our own lives.