I am Kian.” “Mercy ” she replied. Swallowing hard she forced her gaze away from him. She was being too bold in her perusal but she could not stop looking at him. “Kindness ” he whispered. Their eyes locked and Mercy felt a jolt of some fore...
And the voice spoke even more deliberately: '...but remember what is under the ocean of clouds: eternity.' And suddenly that tranquil world, the world of such simple harmony that you discover as you rise above the clouds, took on an unfamiliar qualit...
The more invested I am in my own ideas about reality, the more those experiences will feel like victimizations rather than the ups and downs of relating. Actually, I believe that the less I conceptualize things that way, the more likely it is that pe...
In my experience, we are always trying to be good to ourselves, to be healthy and safe, but are often doing this in a convoluted way because it’s the best way we know at that moment. As soon as we are ready to open to a healthier way, a path opens ...
Perhaps my sense of reality is not very highly developed, perhaps I lack a sound and reassuring instinct for the solid facts of our earthly existence; I can’t always tell memories from dreams, and often I mistake dreams, coming to life again in col...
Once, long ago, Jesus had called her name, breaking through the darkness of her oppression to set her free from the seven demons that bound her. now He broke through the hopelessness of her grief and despair. Mary might not have recognized His face, ...
According to the Buddha, the failure to recognize the illusion of the self is the source of all ignorance and unhappiness. It is only by renouncing the self, that is, by dropping his ego defences and committing metaphorical suicide, that a person can...
Sometimes fate or life or whatever you want to call it, leaves a door a little open and you walk through it. But sometimes it locks the door and you have to find the key, or pick the lock, or knock the damn thing down. And sometimes, it doesn't even ...
To better understand God we must first shatter our own idea of God - maybe even day after day. Maybe he's too great to stay compressed in the human mind. Maybe he splits it wide open; this is why pretentious intellectualism so often fails to comprehe...
He turned away, and suddenly she thought about the old children's story, where the stupid girl opens the box that God gave her, and all the evils of the world fly out, except Hope, which stays at the bottom; and she wondered what Hope was doing in th...
Carol, a swing-shift cocktail waitress in the Bird of Paradise's show lounge had gotten home (guesswork, here) around 2:15 - 2:30, poured herself a glass of milk, and had opened the back door of the kitchen for reasons unknown. (Fingerprints were lat...
When we lay the soil of our hard lives opened the rain of grace and let Joy permeate our cracked and dry places, let joy soak into our broken skin and deep crevices, life grows. How can this not be the best thing for the world? for us? The clouds ope...
Joy is a flame that glimmers only in the palm of the open and humble hand. In an open and humble palm, released and surrendered to receive, light dances, flickers happy. The moment the hand is clenched tight, fingers all pointing towards self and rig...
We don’t even survive in the memories of the living. Science has destroyed that myth. Whenever we remember something, what we’re doing is remembering the last time we remembered it; our memory doesn’t go back to the original notch, the first on...
He lay, often, looking at her sleeping face in the new light that fell in through the open walls of the strange house, and he stared at her skin and hair with his mouth open, transfixed by the quick stillness of her, struck dumb with the physical fac...
No. This would be better as a team." She dragged her top drawer open, rooted out her aspirin. "I should have fired her weeks ago. You were right about that. I was wrong." "I need to write this down. Can I borrow a pencil?" "Shut up." Grateful that hi...
The Mozart sonata Dad picked out begins to play. When we hear the first note, we open the sacks and the ladybugs escape through the opening, taking flight. It's as if someone has dumped rubies from heaven. Soon they will land on the plants in search ...
The gate is perfectly simple," Temeraire said. "There is only a bar across the fence, which one can lift very easily, and then it swings open; Nitidus could do it best, for his forehands are the smallest. Though it is difficult to keep the animals in...
When friends come to Rome in early summer to visit me I like to take them to the Pantheon during thunderstorms and stand them beneath the opening of the feathery, perfectly proportioned dome as rain falls through the open roof against the marble floo...
An old book was a time capsule. When you opened the front cover, you opened a door to another world—a world accessible through a kind of looking glass made of hard-board and cloth. The author’s voice resonated in the reader’s head with the same...
Adults constantly raise the bar on smart children, precisely because they're able to handle it. The children get overwhelmed by the tasks in front of them and gradually lose the sort of openness and sense of accomplishment they innately have. When th...
