When your past
comes to live
in the woods
behind your house,
you must go
to the window,
forgive yourself
once again,
and welcome
the creature
that suns himself
on the sill.

I don't think that it is always necessary to talk about the deepest and most private dimension of who we are, but I think we are called to talk to each other out of it, and just as importantly to listen to each other out of it, to live out of our depths as well as our shallows. We are all of us adolescents, painfully growing and groping our way toward something like true adulthood, and maybe the greatest value we have both to teach and to learn as we go is the capacity to be amazed...which is a power to heal us and bless us and in the end maybe even to transform us into truly human beings at last.

The strength of the personal life is often found in the depth and intensity of its isolation. The fight for selfhood is unending. There is the ever-present need to stand alone, unsupported and unchallenged. To be sure of one's self, to be counted for one's self as one's self, is to experience aliveness in its most exciting dimension.

If there is work to be done that is impossible, if there is a need to be met that is limitless, if there is a word to be said that can never be said, the spirit of the whole person is mustered and in the exhaustive effort we find our self in the solitariness of strength renewed and courage regained.

This above all, to refuse to be a victim. Unless I can do that I can do nothing. I have to recant, give up the old belief that I am powerless.

You want to be reborn, you want that a new and better you should emerge from the frozen hulk winter has made you, you want to be free again? Then you have to let go of the old you. You must be willing to walk into the midst of the sea on dry ground and risk it all.

Our spiritual journey does not start with a clean slate. We carry with us a prepackaged set of values and preconceived ideas which, unless confronted and redirected, will soon scuttle our journey, or else turn it into pharisaism, the occupational hazard of religious and spiritual people.

The developmental character of human life has become much better known in the last hundred years, and it has enormous implications for the spiritual journey. Our personal histories are computerized, so to speak, in the biocomputers of our brains and nervous systems. Our memory banks have on file everything that occurred from the womb to the present, especially memories with strong emotional charges....

We may not remember the events of early childhood, but the emotions do. When events occur later in life that resemble those once felt to be harmful, dangerous, or rejecting, the same feelings surface.... The human heart is designed for unlimited happiness--for limitless truth and for limitless love--and nothing less can satisfy. We travel down various roads that promise happiness but can't provide it because they are only partial goods. Since the emotional programs from early childhood are already in place, our search for happiness in aduluts life tends to be programmed by childish expectations that cannot possibly be realized....

We come now to the heart of the problem of the human condition. Jesus addressed this problem head-on in the gospel. What was his first word when beginning his ministry? "Repent." To repent is not to take on afflictive penances like fasting, vigils, flagellation or whatever else appeals. It means to change the direction in which you are looking for happiness.

A man must get away
now and then
to experience loneliness.

Only those who learn how to live
in loneliness
can come to know themselves
and life.

I go out there and walk
and look at the trees and sky.
I listen to the sounds of loneliness.
I sit on a rock or stump
and say to myself,

"Who are you, Sandburg?
Where have you been,
and where are you going?"

To give thanks is to recognize what has come to you.... How does the seed give thanks? It flowers. You take what you have, who you are, and you respond to the gift of that beingness with a course of action that aligns with it. You do what is in your nature.

It is a world-shattering disclosure that the stream of life is a single stream, though it takes various forms as it spills over into time and space. This disclosure is made to anyone whose discipline sends him on high adventure within his own spirit, his own inner life. By prayer, by the deep inward gaze which opens the eyes of the soul to behold the presence of God, a person feels the steady rhythm of life itself. We seem to be behind the scene of all persons, things and events. The deep hunger to be understood is at last seen to be one and the same with the hunger to understand.

The individual who is simple, who accepts themselves as they are, makes only a minimum demand on others in their relations with them. Their simplicity not only endows their own personality with unique beauty; it is also an act of love. This is an example of the truth that whatever sanctifies our own soul does, at the same time, beneft everyone who comes into our life.