Summer Of Reads

The length of a day - a turn from darkness to light and back again - fits our human capacity for taking stock, our ability to be in the present but also to take a larger, more reflective view of things.

Families are where you show up for supper, no matter how tired you are. Praying is the same ... It's where you show up, day after day, even when you don't think you have much to offer.

Frequent and regular acts of attention are anchors for the practice of receiving the day.

We all need someone who sees our emergencies as their emergencies too.

I'm interested in everything ... but I want the scientists right now because they are the modern mystics, much more than the theologians.

Nothingness is the sister of possibility. It makes an urgent space for that which is new, surprising, and unexpected. When you feel nothingness and emptiness gnawing at your life, there is no need to despair. This is a call from your soul, awakening your life to new possibilities.

Where you belong should always be worthy of your dignity.

The negative threatens us so powerfully precisely because it is an invitation to an art of compassion and self-enlargement that our small thinking utterly resists.

Familiarity is one of the most subtle and pervasive forms of human alienation.

Your body is your clay home; your body is the only home that you have in this universe. It is in and through your body that your soul becomes visible and real for you. Your body is the home of your soul on earth.

We all mess things up. It's what you do with the mess that matters.

A divorce wasn't the end of family, nor was someone moving away the end of a friendship. These things could be endings, but only if you decided to make them so. Otherwise, things just added up and continued forward, across the map, in new shapes and iterations.

It wasn't that he didn't know what to do at parties. He just found them viscerally boring: like getting dressed for a big night out and then spending your evening in an intermission lobby, bumping against people you vaguely recognize and fumbling to align conversation topics for brief windows of validation.

...a classic pitfall of (white) feminism: instead of inventing our own power structures and abolishing gender roles in a way that promotes true equality and compassion, we just coopt failed masculine structures and roles.

We are all of us more complicated than the roles we are assigned in the stories other people tell.