Unfinished Vow: Bodhicitta, as Dōgen understands it, is not an emotional intensity that burns itself out but a disciplined way of inhabiting relationship, continually renewed because it arises from the realization that there has never been a separate self struggling alone against an impossible world.

~Joan Halifax

how I gather all of my lovies together…

inquiry for today~ how will you gather into love?

right in the heart of this life….

A fish doesn’t own the water it moves through any more than a bird owns the air it flies through. Nor does a soul in a body in time on Earth own the myriad forms of life it moves through. To correct this miseducation is crucial, if we are to befriend life more completely as we age. For the rhythms of life—of its comings and goings—are the teachers that model for us how we will come and go, how we will erode and grow, how we will come apart and come together, and how we will mourn and accept what is lost so we can be cleansed anew in order to be enlivened by what is gained.

So, I invite you to be tender and honest in looking at your life. Can you stop amassing and hoarding your way through life and start relating to the ebb and flow of life as it moves through you? Can you stop measuring your worth by the number of things you possess and start measuring your aliveness by how open you are to all that you meet?

~Mark Nepo