Just because we are working hard does not mean we are making anything happen.

Gratitude invites a sense of sufficiency.

What if the healing of the world utterly depends on the ten-thousand invisible kindnesses we offer simply and quietly throughout the pilgrimage of each human life?

Be not afraid. A kind life, a life of spirit, is fundamentally a life of courage-the courage simply to bring what you have, to bring who you are.

In that inevitable, excruciatingly human moment, we are offered a powerful choice. This choice is perhaps one of the most vitally important choices we will ever make, and it determines the course of our lives from that moment forward. The choice is this: Will we interpret this loss as so unjust, unfair, and devastating that we feel punished, angry, forever and fatally wounded-- or, as our heart, torn apart, bleeds its anguish of sheer, wordless grief, will we somehow feel this loss as an opportunity to become more tender, more open, more passionately alive, more grateful for what remains?

As we explore the nature of our gift, our goal is to move toward this kind of giving: cheerful giving that flows gently and easily, kingly giving that flows surely from who we are. As we encounter the questions—Who are we ? What do we love ?—the gift we bring will be easy, because our gift naturally emerges from who we are. The offering we bring is ourselves, just as we are. Our gift is our true nature. There can be no greater gift than this.

Can it then be that what we call the 'self' is fluid and elastic? It evolves, strikes a different balance with every new breath.