Like I’ve always thought that tradition is to the community what memory is to the individual. And if you lose your memory, and you wake up in the morning, you don’t know where you are, who you are, what ground you’re standing on. And if you lose your tradition, it’s the same thing.

stress is a perverted relationship to time, so that rather than being a subject of your own time, you have become its target and victim, and time has become routine

One way — and I think this is a really lovely way, and I think it’s an interesting question to ask oneself, too. And the question is, when is the last time that you had a great conversation, a conversation which wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, which is what passes for conversation a lot in this culture? But when had you last a great... See more

your identity is not equivalent to your biography, and that there is a place in you where you have never been wounded, where there is still a sureness in you, where there’s a seamlessness in you, and where there is a confidence and tranquility in you. And I think the intention of prayer and spirituality and love is, now and again, to visit that... See more

God” is only our name for it, and the closer we get to it, the more it ceases to be God. So then you’re on a real safari with the wildness and danger and otherness of God. And I think when you begin to get a sense of the depth that is there, then your whole heart wakens up.

So what I think happens here a bit is that there’s a reduction of identity to biography. And they’re not the same thing. I think biography unfolds identity and makes it visible and puts the mirror of it out there, but I think identity is a more complex thing.

Beauty is about more rounded, substantial becoming.

I also think of those unknown people who are the real heroes for me, who you never hear about, who hold out on lines, on frontiers of awful want and awful situations and manage, somehow, to go beyond the given impoverishments and offer gifts of possibility and imagination and seeing.

there is very little time or attention given to what you could almost call learning the art of inwardness; or a pedagogy of interiority. That’s why I find the aesthetic things, like poetry, fiction, good film, theater, drama, dance, and music, actually awaken that inside you and remind you that there is a huge interiority within you.