Meditations for the Heart, Mind, and Spirit

I experience deeper kinship with my cat than I do with most humans. When I look into his eyes, and he mine, there is beholding, beyond what words can convey. He loves touch, as do I. He treasures rest and nourishment, as do I. He values silence and solitude, as do I. He also longs for connection and play, as do I. We are animals, he and I, and all of us sentient beings, and it strikes me that we are more similar than dissimilar, with words and their importance greatly exagger

Don’t try to encourage others. For all you know, some may need to go down first before they are ready to be lifted up. Instead, be you. As simply and as gently as you can. Be you in this moment, in the context of your immediate relationships, amidst the details of your present surroundings, listening deeply, and learning carefully what is actually required of you, here and now. Allow yourself to be silently drawn by the stronger pull of what you really love, as Rumi recommend

Human existence is nothing if not a matter of possession. We are possessed by a spirit of wanting, and it is this essential possession that drives us toward all other possessions. The possession of certain beliefs, to abate an unnerving sense of the uncertain. The possession of objects and things, to soothe a sense of emptiness that sometimes seems endless. We can be reticent to own it, ironically, but wanting is  what defines us most in our actual day-to-day experience as cr

Nietzsche said the only kind of writing he loved was that written by a person in his or her own blood. “Write with blood,” Nietzsche said, “and you will find that blood is spirit.” Spirit, or essence, finds its way into our words only when we risk offering ourselves wholly—the totality of our selves —not part, but every part, the sanguine and the shadowed, the composed and the awkward, the beautiful and the ugly strains of who we are. And this very much is  a risk because suc

The conversational nature of reality is not to be taken for granted. Nor is this mere metaphor. A vexed spirit settled by the setting sun. The rain to wash away our worries for a spell. A mellowing mood offered by a meadow for the mind to meander and so find a measure of freedom from the known. When we rush through our days we seldom notice the gratuitous volume of our surroundings, our hearing muffled by the mayhem of the world and the unmanageable pace so many of us set for