Effortlessness is the ability to slow down and listen for the spaces between the joints... Deep within all things there is a natural rhythm, a music of opening and closing, expansion and contraction.

All life has emptiness at its core; it is the quiet hollow reed through which the wind of God blows and makes the music that is our life.

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?

Because we do not rest we lose our way...Poisoned by the hypnotic belief that good things come only through unceasing determination and tireless effort, we never truly rest. And for want of rest, our lives are in danger.

Emptiness is the pregnant void out of which all creation springs. But many of us fear emptiness. We prefer to remain...surrounded by things...we imagine are subject to our control.

Our lives are made of these moments. Simple words and actions, taken together, weave a single day, and our days become our life. Every gesture is a seed, and the seed determines the harvest.

If we do not allow for a rhythm of rest in our overly busy lives, illness becomes our Sabbath— our pneumonia, our cancer, our heart attack, our accidents create Sabbath for us.