Breath is crucial for life. Physical respiration goes on as a largely unconscious process as the body exchanges oxygen and carbon dioxide to power the activities of every cell in our bodies. Deliberate deep breathing will ensure that we take in enough oxygen and can calm feelings of breathlessness or fear. Conscious breathing used as part of a spiritual practice focuses the mind's attention and helps relieve stress on our bodies.
Twenty-five years of listening to stories of pain in individuals' lives have taught me many important lessons. Perhaps the most important is the art of listening. If I reduce the pain I hear to a static moment or try to freeze it with my understanding, then I interrupt a process which always has a deeper meaning embedded within it. Pain is a messenger, a strange winged visitor that asks us to pay attention and listen beyond our usual preoccupations and concerns.
The voice of the solar wind -- aptly named "chorus" -- is both ethereal and haunting. You can hear echoes of crickets and snatches of whole song in this celestial starry music that bathes our planet. Everything is in vibratory relationship with everything else.
From the "strings" to the fluctuating pulses of cosmic radiationb that attend the expansion of the universe, there is a song that sounds through the fabric of our physical universe. The music of life is heard everywhere. It is we who fail to hear the music.
Once when we were walking together, I saw Teilhard fall to his knees just to study a stone. He held it up to the light and ran his fingers carefully over its surfaces, as if he were trying to read the pattern of matter as a language. Watching him that day in the blessed silence of the field, I saw a man who could see light in the very earth under his feet. Because of him I learned not to hate our enemy, and joined with him in the work of serving those who were in need. And sometimes at sunset when the sky was bright with amazing color, I tried to look beyond the trenches — as he did so often — and see the light in this world of ours.
I didn't know what courage was until I met Harriet Tubman. And I'm telling you I studied hard something fierce 'cause I wanted to know the source of that courage. I asked her once and she said, "It ain't me. It couldn't be. I've got a guardian angel, that's what I have. They come when you think of others more'n yourself. They come like bees to honey."