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

Anytime I need to be born again, she says, I just go back to Harlem.

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.

There will always be people who are threatened by freedom in another person. Who have something to gain from our bondage.

Author bell hooks said, “Women’s liberationists, white and black, will always be at odds with one another as long as our idea of liberation is based on having the power white men have. For that power denies unity, denies common connections, and is inherently divisive.”

It took time for me to accept that where we are has as much to do with our formation as with whom and during what. Place is the one thing that always is. We are always somewhere. I have been without people but never without place. Perhaps that is why it is so easy to become numb to it.

I do not celebrate crumbs when I know of the bread that has been promised to me.

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.

psychological wisdom explains, it is difficult to control the targets of our numbing.