The human heart is the first home of democracy. It is where we embrace our questions: Can we be equitable? Can we be generous? Can we listen with our whole beings, not just our minds, and offer our attention rather than our opinion? And do we have enough resolve in our hearts to act courageously, relentlessly, without giving up, trusting our fellow citizens to join us in our determined pursuit-a living democracy?

Blind obedience in the name of patriotism or religion ultimately takes our lives.

Hope radiates outward from the center of our concerns. Hope dares us to stare the miraculous in the eye and have the courage not to look away.

I think we are living a life without specificity, and then our lives become abstractions.

Greed is a deprivation of abundance, a hoarding, a constriction of energy.

I think we have to stand up against what is unacceptable, and to push the boundaries and reclaim a more humane way of being in the world, so that we can extend our compassionate intelligence and begin to work with a strengthened will and imagination that can take us into the future.

I worry, that we are a people in a process of great transition and we are forgetting what we are connected to. We are losing our frame of reference.