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

I think when we give ourselves to play, the scope of our lives expands.

My neurologist calls me Mystery. Maybe at one point I would’ve found a strange pride in this. But when your body is leaving you, you’d give anything to be perfectly ordinary. I’m prepared to be emptied of complexity. Make me simple—known and understood and obvious. But that isn’t my name.

these were women who knew their worth. And they stood in power in front of the powerful because of it. They didn’t sulk around waiting for someone to recognize their worth, they walked in it.

For me, falling asleep is a mercy that comes only after about an hour of my soul trying to jump out at me.

I think awe is an exercise, both a doing and a being. It is a spiritual muscle of our humanity that we can only keep from atrophying if we exercise it habitually.

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.

Mine is a joy born not of laughter but of peace. This is okay.

To have the audacity to be and love and know yourself in a world content to have you live your days in hiding—this is bliss.

The tragedy is that as we distance ourselves from the delight of our youth, we become increasingly prone to disillusionment. Wonder and beauty are not precise cures for disillusionment, but they certainly can stave off the despair of it. To reclaim the awe of our child-selves, to allow ourselves to be taken by the beauty of a thing, allows goodness