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

Did you know that birds do not land because they are tired? It is a remembrance. They know and have always known that their liberation depends on their ability to recall the ground.

The land I live on is not mine to have, but mine to nurture. I am responsible.

Place has always been the thing that made us. We cannot escape being formed by it.

Rest is not the reward of our liberation, nor something we lay hold of once we are free. It is the path that delivers us there.

I used to romanticize a nomadic existence. I used to think it was a requisite for “finding myself”—to travel around untethered until I stumbled upon a realness in me. It makes me wince to think that I thought I could learn myself by untethering.

Joy doesn’t replace any emotion; it holds them all and keeps any one of them from swallowing us whole. Society has failed to understand this. When it tells us to find joy in suffering, it is telling us to let it go, to move on, to smile through it. But joy says, Hold on to your sorrow. It can rest safely here.

I’ve learned that this world has no commitments to my body. No one will try to understand it more than I will. I learned the necessity not only of listening to your own body but also of fighting for it.

thoughts and ways were never anything like mine? But each year I know love and belonging—a love that doesn’t require sacrifice at the altar of acceptance—I become more of who I already am. I am liberated into what Merton calls my “true self.” I believe this is my deepest calling.

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.