You don't go around grieving all the time, but the grief is still there and always will be.
Awe is the beginning of wisdom. Awe is the beginning of education.
If you look closely at a tree you'll notice it's knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.
Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.
We must work on our souls, enlarging and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of life-the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life, to the laughter and the sorrow, the enlightening and the frightening, the inspiring and the silly.
The system is not working. That is how a paradigm shift begins: the established way of seeing the world no longer functions.
Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage - big-heartedness - is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain - and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen - then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain's victims instead of the healers we might become.
Obstacles do not appear in your way in order to stop you. Rather, they appear in order to strengthen and hone you and your plans. They are not your enemy. They are your secret ally, but only if you treat them as friendly forces of nature.
Our trouble is not ignorance, but inaction.
Economy is a subject which admits of being treated with levity, but it cannot so be disposed of.
It's a lot easier to make friends when you're younger, because kids are a lot less judgmental than adults. They're more like, "O. K. , let's be friends. " Not, "So, what's your job?" "What's your marriage status?"