spring

Find your practice and practice it. Find your teaching and follow it. Find your community and be faithful to it. Otherwise, you will tend to float around with no accountability system for what you too easily "believe" in your head. Your own ego will end up being the decider and chooser moment by moment.

"You don't have to prove anything," my mother said. "Just be ready for what God sends."

I listened and put my hand out in the sun again. It was easy.

Give over thine own willing. Give over thine own running. Give over thine own desiring to know or be anything, and sink down to the seed which God chose in thy heart, and let that grow in thee, and be in thee, and breathe in thee, and act in thee, and thou shalt find by sweet experience that the Lord knows that, and loves and owns that, and will lead it to the inheritance of life, which is God's portion.

Don't let people pull you into their storm. But instead, pull them into your peace and make all things new.

And yet, I know artists whose medium is Life itself, and who express the inexpressible without brush, pencil, chisel, or guitar. They neither paint nor dance. Their medium is Being. Whatever their hand touches has increased Life. They SEE and don’t have to draw. They are the artists of being alive.

I have come to believe that unless we are making something, we cannot know the depth of God’s being and God’s grace permeating our lives and God’s creation.

Our spiritual traditions have carried virtues across time. They are tools for the art of living. They are pieces of intelligence about human behavior that neuroscience is now exploring with new words and images: what we practice, we become. What’s true of playing the piano or throwing a ball also holds for our capacity to move through the world mindlessly and destructively or generously and gracefully. I’ve come to think of virtues and rituals as spiritual technologies for being our best selves in flesh and blood, time and space.

Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!

The man who has many answers
is often found
in the theaters of information
where he offers, graciously,
his deep findings.
While the man who has only questions,
to comfort himself, makes music.

Education is...a drawing out of one’s own genius, nature, and heart. The manifestation of one’s essence, the unfolding of one’s capacities, the revelation of one’s heretofore hidden possibilities... From another side, study amplifies the speech and song of the world so that it’s more palpably present.

Education in the soul leads to the enchantment of the world and the attunement of self.