This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us

From a young age, my siblings and I were allowed to travel deep into our interior worlds to become aware of ourselves, our loves, our beliefs. And still, my father demanded an unflinching awareness of our exterior worlds.

flinch. I believe my father saw this in me and did what he could to drown out whatever primordial voice had told me to fold up my personhood into something small and negligible.

For me, most simply, contemplative spirituality is a fidelity to beholding the divine in all things. In the field, on the walk home, sitting under the oak tree that hugs my house. A sacred attention.

It is more remembrance than revelation, more maybes than certainty.

If you want to know if you’ve forgotten how to marvel, try staring at something beautiful for five minutes and see where your mind goes.

to him and stands him upright again. He says, It’s not arrogant to wow yourself every once in a while. It’s not arrogance, it’s just paying attention.

Just as outer voices can lead you away from the well of your own selfhood, they also have the capacity to usher you into new depths of it. And if practiced right, your calling into selfhood may enhance the sound of self in someone else.

To survive it, we must gain a certain loyalty to our selfhood. We must free the part of ourselves that seeks to protect the self. I’ve accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me.

but as one who believes that mystery swells the womb of every given moment, I’ve made a point never to preclude it.