unknown. Only when he has the courage to step into the darkness, as O’Donohue depicts it, does the light to guide him to the next step reveal itself.

The first step on the journey of faith is to recognize that everything is moving onward to something else, inside us and outside.

RILKE WROTE: “So you must not be frightened…if a sadness rises up before you larger than any you have ever seen; if a restiveness like light and cloud shadows passes over your hands and over all you do. You must think…that life has not forgotten you.”

As long as we remain on the surface of life, everyone and everything seems to exist as isolated entities.

In Pali, faith is a verb, an action, as it is also in Latin and Hebrew. Faith is not a singular state that we either have or don’t have, but is something that we do. We “faithe.” Saddha is the willingness to take the next step, to see the unknown as an adventure, to launch a journey.

A relationship is difficult and disappointing, then transforms into a bond we trust.

One of the hardest parts of all the loss and dislocation was that it was surrounded by an ambient, opaque silence about what was happening. Because no one spoke openly or even acknowledged all the changes as loss, my immense grief, anger, and confusion remained held inside.

One of the best depictions of awareness comes from Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. In a class he was teaching he drew a loose V shape in the center of a large white sheet of paper. “What is this a picture of?” he asked. The students all responded, “It’s a bird.” “No,” Trungpa Rinpoche said. “It’s a picture of the sky, with a bird flying through it.” Like

The good news is that, according to the same law of interconnectedness, what we do individually and collectively does make a difference.