We find our voice, we lose our voice, we retrieve it, honor it, and hopefully, learn how to share it with others and stand in the center of our power. Translation is a theme. Fear and courage are a theme.

Dying doesn't cause suffering. Resistance to dying does.

I recently got back from Hiroshima and it was fascinating to me how the Japanese accommodate this paradox. We were talking about this word aware, which on the page looks like "aware," which speaks to both the pain and the beauty of our lives. Being there, what I perceived was that this is a sorrow that is not a grief that one forgets or recovers from, but it is a burning, searing illumination of love for the delicacy and strength of our relations.

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 see myself as a human being. You're right, I am an American, I do live in Utah, and I am deeply ashamed about the decisions our President is making around the world, in our name: the war in Iraq, his continued denial about global warming, the wholesale degradation of the environment on every level. Since September 11, 2001, I have come to believe that there are many forms of terrorism, and environmental degradation is one of them. We have to transcend our government and relate to each other as human beings first and Americans second and feel both our local and global responsibilities.

We usually recognize a beginning. Endings are more difficult to detect. Most often, they are realized only after reflection. Silence. We are seldom conscious when silence begins—it is only afterward that we realize what we have been a part of. In the night journeys of Canada geese, it is the silence that propels them. Thomas Merton writes, “Silence is the strength of our interior life.… If we fill our lives with silence, then we will live in hope.

How do we take our anger and transform it into sacred rage? How do we create a language that opens the heart instead of closing it? To bear witness is not a passive act. It's an act of consequence that leads to consciousness. It matters. I am curious. I want to know why. I was raised with a scripture that says, "The glory of God is intelligence." And to me our greatest intelligence is following our instincts, trusting our intuition.