This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation

God renews the entire world every day. We make this declaration every day in our prayer service, acknowledging that every day can be a newly experienced birth and that we can once again see the world with the newness of a child.

The wise man went under the table, and the very first thing he did, his first lesson, was just to sit there.

We cut ourselves off from the world’s suffering, because we fear it will undermine or destroy our own happiness. But if there are homeless

would only come when his mind was empty.

Heaven thinks that the poor are to be helped, not blamed. But the primitive impulse to blame the poor for their plight persists.

was a classic illustration of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle—that the act of observation changes what is being observed.

Maybe then they won’t have to spend so much of their life’s energy defending against the truth of their own lives.

What am I doing to make this recur again and again? Even if it is a conflict that was clearly thrust upon me from the outside, how am I plugging in to it, what is there in me that needs to be engaged in this conflict?

The present moment is the only place we experience ourselves as being alive, the only place we experience our lives at all. The walk through the forest—the focus on the path, on the process of life, rather than on some goal or end that exists beyond the present-tense reality of our lives—this is the answer God provided for this student.

the rise after the fall, of the soul engaging with its pain and then going on with its full strength, a strength strangely drawn from the pain itself.