Meditations for the Heart, Mind, and Spirit

How does one speak about things that cannot be spoken? We know that the ant communicates with its brethren according to its own ad hoc way of conveyance; the ant can do nothing less, or more, than just this, such that the notion of an ant trying to discuss, say, quantum mechanics, rightly appears absurd and impossible. There are undoubtedly many such matters that a human being cannot fathom or articulate as well—lest we be swept away by the madness of hubris and imagine ourse

A place, a person, a particular season of life—all of these things and more have a feel. We are often most ignorant of this feel when we have been immersed in a milieu for a prolonged period of time, and conversely, we notice this feel more easily when we enter a relation or situation anew, almost immediately and intuitively picking up on a slew of context clues, subtle and explicit tones, the overt and covert trappings and textures that make for a domain, province, atmospher

Not only connection but disconnection is vital to experience. If we do not effectively disconnect often enough from devices, demands, and those identities we inhabit much of the time, we may very well come to forget the more that we are—the vast, unrealized potentialities within us, our essential orientation “toward a plus factor in existence,” as Jack Finegan once put it, and the power we each possess to become, beyond any personal prisons that cage us. There is thunder in o

Compassion is not first and foremost about loving others or even oneself but suffering—from the Latin compassio meaning to “suffer with”—and as such is one of the most beautiful qualities of our humanity. Before any would-be efforts to fix a situation, and prior to many well-intentioned words that would likely fall flat anyway, true compassion appears originally as a form of presence, the desire to be with another suffering, to feel, as much as one can from afar, the heartach

Equanimity is not zen but zombie-like, a state of inner calm and composure at the ghastly cost of authentic being and becoming...