Becoming Wise

It’s time to dare this more bravely in our midst, and dare learning

dare learning together how love can be practical, creative, and sustained as a social good, not merely a private good.

But I am emboldened by the fact that surprise is the only constant. We are never really running the show, never really in control, and nothing will go quite as we imagined it.

But tolerance doesn’t welcome. It allows, endures, indulges. In the medical lexicon, it is about the limits of thriving in an unfavorable environment.

What I try to explain is, even if I am drawing on personal experience, the truth of a poem is actually much deeper than whether or not something really happened. What matters is an undergirding truth that I think is the power of poetry.

I can disagree with your opinion, it turns out, but I can’t disagree with your experience.

What then? How would I live if I was exactly what’s needed to heal the world?

My only measure of the strength of a question now is in the honesty and eloquence it elicits.

And he says something I find extremely beautiful and strong, that we will continue to despise people until we have recognized, loved, and accepted what is despicable in ourselves

And so what we have learned is that what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. So

And so what we have learned is that what makes you resilient to trauma is to own yourself fully. So if somebody says hurtful or insulting things, you can say, “interesting, that person is saying hurtful and insulting things.”

But the freedom of knowing that means I just have to do my part.

All of creation is one body. I’m only just a little piece of it. But the freedom of knowing that means I just have to do my part.

Because if we just fight and resist—this is the other piece about contemplative life—if we just fight against something, it reinforces it.

To living together even if the problem isn’t solved, right?

the ingrained lure of the possibility of going

We knew what we were against. We just didn’t know what we were for.

Our experience, our story, is in some way the only real thing?

Because by sanitizing the world of subjectivity, you basically leave out the moral possibilities.