You have to go through the darkness to truly know the light. This may sound like a cliche, but it's true nonetheless. Often the greatest doubts occur just before a breakthrough.

So we're all living spirit. It's not about isms and schims or religions. Religions are almost like political institutions, but the heart of it is the spirituality.

Like many others, I sometimes find that cooking can be naturally grounding.

Spirit is love, spirit is connection, inclusive, and that's what I'm interested in, and that's what moved me. That's what I got more and more into as I grew up and as I was in college in the 60's with consciousness raising and other kind of things, gestalt psychology etc.

Spiritually speaking, everything that one wants, aspires to, and needs is ever-present, accessible here and now - for those with eyes to see.

However, we need to participate and manage skillfully, helpfully, and harmoniously, for a better world, family and society to be possible. So everybody's spiritual by nature I believe, not that they necessarily have to be religious. Everybody wants, or cares about, and has values even if they don't talk about them all the time explicitly, like some noisy preachers do with their foghorn voices and dogmatic views.

Everybody has similar values. You travel around the world and everybody is different, but everybody is also the same in those ways. There's so much difference but there's so much similarity. Nobody wants to be harmed, or have their children, or their mates, or their relatives, or their families harmed, exploited, bombed, starved, dislocated, or become homeless refugees. So we're all similar in that way and spiritual life and religion is supposed to be part of the solution not part of the problem.