reality. When we feel torn away from connection and purpose, we can end up so caught in our state of mind that the whole world seems to exist in reference to our pain.

This buddha nature, with its two wings of love and awareness,

In Buddhist teaching, however, the immediate result of an action, and how others respond to it, is only a small part of its value. There are two other significant aspects: the intention giving rise to an action and the skillfulness with which we perform it.

Suddenly the image of my mother came into my mind. I realized for the first time that her life and her death were really her story, not mine. They were a part of my story, but not the primary part.

IN PALI, the language of the original Buddhist texts, the word usually translated as faith, confidence, or trust is saddha. Saddha literally means “to place the heart upon.”

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.”

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

Faith, in contrast, reminds us of the ever-changing flow of life, with all its movement and possibility. Faith is the capacity of the heart that allows us to draw close to the present and find there the underlying thread connecting the moment’s experience to the fabric of all of life. It opens us to a bigger sense of who we are and what we are

“There is darkness in the world, but it is merely an absence of light. All the darkness in the world cannot dispel even the smallest candle flame. We need only to accustom ourselves to the dim vision, and then the blessing of light will grow.”