Experience, all of it, is a direct knowing through outer or inner senses or both. Reality is what we perceive to be real through our senses. It is only through the body that we can get an experience of reality and can understand the world. When you know something in your body, you know it. Until you known something in your body, you know it. Until you know and incorporate it in your body, reality is an abstract concept. The body is the objective experience of consciousness. The more you learn to trust the experience of your body, about the past or the present, the more confidence you gain in your ability to know what’s real. You also gain an increased awareness in the nuances and cues. Recovering the body means rediscovering through the senses your own reality, past or present…….Rita Justice

compassion recognizes humanity’s deep fragility…..we relinquish our deep hold and carry lightly…..fumbling is crucial to the vulnerable heart…..

When the gift I give to the other is integral to my own nature, when it comes from a place of organic reality within me, it will renew itself- and me- even as I give it away. Only when I give something that does not grow within me do I deplete myself and harm the other as well, for only harm can come from a gift that is forced, inorganic, unreal…..Parker J. Palmer

lingering here

Some time when the river is ice ask me

mistakes I have made. Ask me whether

what I have done is my life. Others

have come in their slow way into

my thought, and some have tried to help

or to hurt: ask me what difference

their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.

You and I can turn and look

at the silent river and wait. We know

the current is there, hidden; and there

are comings and goings from miles away

that hold the stillness exactly before us.

What the river says, that is what I say.

…William Stafford