Like the North African light, our inner incandescence reveals the hallucinatory and the ordinary, the magic and the grim.

When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right. My Jesuit friend Tom used to say that he never noticed what he was feeling; only that he was right.

To have a few amazing friends on this side of eternity, this sometimes grotesque amusement park, is the greatest joy.

In my current less-young age, I’ve learned that almost more than anything, stories hold us together. Stories teach us what is important about life, why we are here and how it is best to behave, and that inside us we have access to treasure, in memories and observations, in imagination.

Most of my spiritual breakthroughs have been against my will. I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset.

To paraphrase Paul Tillich, the opposite of faith is not doubt, but certainty.

Light not only warms, of course, but illuminates both things we want to see and don’t want to see.

Almost thirty years ago, when I called my mentor Horrible Bonnie at my most toxic and hysterical, having screwed up as a mother, she said to me, “Dearest? Here is the secret: You are preapproved.” I kept asking her, “Really?”

Your inside person does not have an age. It is all the ages you have ever been and the age you are at this very moment.