The beauty of other languages is that you can see… beyond the walls your own grammar has constructed. The mind finds easy passage in some avenues, where in English, say, or German or some other tongue, it had been constricted. Why consider the Earth an anarchy, a Babel? Were it not for the incomprehensible complexity of our language, we would reduce the richness of a rainforest to the flatness of the desert. The mind is master and the mind is also the creation, and our thoughts draft pathways that our spirit can walk, from early lessons to later experience.

We tell ourselves that what we experience in a moment’s time, also passes in a moment’s time. We step out into the street, for example, and while crossing a car ignores the red light, and you are nearly hit: whew! That was close. And now it is history.

That is a mistaken impression, however. We have trained our eyes on our next paces, or we laughingly pick up the thread of conversation from before our scare, and move on as though nothing had happened; but something has happened, and we engrave the events of our physical lives in the same way a tree writes rings into its body for every hard winter, or an animal writes scars into its flesh and into its spirit for the threats it has narrowly avoided.

When the eyes are open, all of Creation is reduced to surfaces… imagine the poverty in a world of surfaces. As though all that an ocean offered us was its waves! As soon as the eyes open, the interiors begin to close, the interiors of everything that sight obscures from us, the interior of our selves as well.

Eyesight is the sense of abstractions and of interpretation; we interact with the world at a distance, when our other and more proximate senses cannot give us their information. To close the eyes, one is taught, is to live in darkness; but to close the eyes with awareness, to be listening with your being, invites light – so much more than one can imagine.

It began the year that you became a father, the year of your transformation. In those months following the birth of your first child, your son, the chaff of accumulated living was burned away, and those things you had believed with more and more conviction to be True, became in the end only ideas you thought were true, mere thoughts you wore like styles of clothes, which now were worn out, out of fashion, out of season, useful only to dress yourself in nostalgia… in those few moments you found time to indulge in nostalgia.

Work is what sustains us – work that we have chosen – sustains us by bringing bread for the service we have provided, gives us purpose and, hopefully, a sense of satisfaction as the world turns on its axis, and whirls us into shadow of the Earth once again.

The fruit of your work you bring into your home, you offer to your partner and your children, to your friends. So choose well, that the fruit and its offering be sweet. As important as our daily labor becomes in our lives, however, it offers precious little cord for our fingers to grip, when what we think is immutable inevitably dissolves, and what we have built crumbles under heavy weather… to make way for something new. It happens – or if it doesn’t happen, you’re even in worse shape, having run as far from change as possible, into a far corner of your life; and while you may have decorated your cell beautifully, you cannot alter the fact that it is a cell after all. 

You walk through your day dissatisfied; there is something missing, or something amiss. In the evening you are tired, but it is weariness of spirit, not a physical depletion. Your body has not been a channel for a day well lived, life flowing into and through you, now ready to be replenished; instead, your energy is bound within you, collected and unreleased. To a full vessel nothing may be added, so everything the world had to offer went untasted. Something is missing, or something amiss. 

There are so many useful goals for a life. There seems to be one for every occasion, all so very useful. To be a success, to raise fine children, to travel the world, to follow pleasure where it leads, to save souls… 

My goals have been high, now they are not so lofty: to write one beautiful poem; to avoid hurting those I love; to smile more often; to become human before I die. 

You must acknowledge the beauty of loss: it makes your smile more natural, your glance deeper, your touch more compassionate. How many adults have been toughened to rigidity by the demands of a life, only to be snapped – like that – by an event that should have been expected?

It’s too bad if you try, try, try to get ahead, try so hard that your body becomes stiff as a board, your kisses dry up, your lovemaking becomes the memory of a memory… Too bad. But no fear, the world won’t forget about you: tomorrow or the next day it will give you a gentle nudge… then a nudge that is slightly less gentle… then a firm shove… and finally stick it’s foot out and drop you in the middle of your next step, what nerve!

If you do not meet the sacred in yourself, you will not meet the sacred in anything; if you meet the sacred anywhere, even in the smallest thing, you will have found the sacred within yourself.

That is the first lesson, before all others. If you have not learned this lesson, reaching for another will reveal nothing of permanence, will move you further from the truth, and questions will be answered with questions.

Evolution is a process that most of us associate with a geological time scale — the slow elucidation of life over the last 3.5 billion years. We also tend to assume that the most recent signs of continuing evolution must be happening in species with short life spans and rapid reproductive rates.

A team of scientists has now discovered that an important human genetic trait — a tolerance in adults for the milk sugar called lactose — might have developed in several East African ethnic groups 2,700 to 6,800 years ago. That is astonishingly recent.