Quotes about Reflection

Grief ends up giving you the two best things: softness and illumination.

The hard silence between frustrated people always feels cluttered. But holy silence is spacious and inviting. You can drink it down. We offer it to ourselves when we work, rest, meditate, bike, read. When we hike by ourselves, we hear a silence still pristine with crunching leaves and birdsong. Silence can be a system of peace, which is mercy, easily offered to a friend needing quiet, harder when the person is one's own annoying self.

In early sobriety I heard that if you have an idea after ten p.m., it is probably not a good idea—and this was before e-mail.

During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved--which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family.

When humans experience something as powerful as a forest or a rainbow, it is not crazy to assign its existence to a Greater Intelligence.

Kids are hard -they drive you crazy and break your heart- whereas grandchildren make you feel great about life, and yourself, and your ability to love someone unconditionally, finally, after all these years.

Are you willing to see what you are seeing, and to know what you know?

To be engrossed by something outside ourselves is a powerful antidote for the rational mind, the mind that so frequently has its head up its own ass—seeing things in such a narrow and darkly narcissistic way that it presents a colo-rectal theology, offering hope to no one.

We can pray for a shot at having a life in which we are present and awake and paying attention and being kind to ourselves. We can pray, "Hello? Is there anyone there?" We can pray, "Am I too far gone, or can you help me get out of my isolated self-obsession?" We can say anything to God. It's all prayer.

Being human can be so dispiriting. It is a real stretch for me a lot of the time.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

Sometimes when you need to feel the all-embracing nature of God, paradoxically you need to hang out in the ordinariness, in daily ritual and comfort.