I encouraged my students to question authority, especially my authority, because only rarely can we recognize our biases without help.

May your kindness abound like hydrogen, which fuels every star.

Beneath the snow, life is bursting, preparing for the next season.

We are living today with time to do good for ourselves and for each other.

Masks let us be someone or something totally different from who we usually are.

I hope that this Great Silence, which has come alongside the suffering, holds the beginnings of our healing.

Rain falls upon the surface of the earth, and pulled by gravity each drop begins to flow downhill. Drop merges with drop, flowing together, into a trickle, a streamlet, a creek, a mighty river, flowing onward. Some of the water seeps down into the earth itself, as groundwater, or deep aquifers,...

This was written as a blessing for pouring out the Water Communion waters onto a memorial garden. Like water that swells rivers and fills the ocean, the memories of those we have loved rush through us. Sometimes they are quiet, almost as if we have forgotten—and then suddenly, they flood our...

I call the tall bush on my back patio “Burning Bush” because in autumn its leaves are a fiery red. All winter long I overlooked three uninhabited nests inside of it. For months and months I could have perceived—but didn’t—what was in plain sight. ...

It would be a quieter holiday, no fireworks or loud parades, no speeches, no salutes to any flag, a day of staying home instead of crowding away, a day we celebrate nothing gained in war but what we’re given — how the sun’s warmth is democratic, touching everyone, and the rain is democratic...

Our light is the light of the sun, keeper of all we love; our light is the light of the earth, provider of sustenance; our light is the light of all living things, life precious like our own....

In this time of long nights and short days, let us seek the light within … by contemplating, through our mind’s eye, the image of a candle flame. Notice how the soft, quiet, and gentle flame tamely rises from the wick. Yet, just by touching a dry twig, it has the power to become a raging bonfire...

People have always known that fire was special. Long, long ago, before people made matches or candles or even made houses, people knew that fire was special. There was the great fire in the sky, the sun, which made the earth warm and made night into day....

Once there was and once there was not a town on the edge of the swamp in the sultry summer weather of far south Florida, between the alligators and the ocean. In this town there were two amazing friends, Sam and Joseph. They were a lot alike. They liked the same foods. They liked the same books.

We come in a variety of colors, shapes, and sizes. Some of us grow in bunches. Some of us grow alone. Some of us are cupped inward, And some of us spread ourselves out wide. Some of us are old and dried and tougher than we appear. Some of us are still in bud....