How to bless you these wild precious days?
Throw open the door before you knock.
Receive every shade of who you are.
Seat you at the table before you’re hungry.
Greet the light that shimmers in your chair.
Pour your tea like ceremony.
Wait upon the words you say
like the soundings of a bell
not rung since ancient times.
Speak truth to you, keeping faith,
even when its sharp edge glistens.
Help you walk the ground of your soul
and soar the heavens of your mind.

My joy in you overflows every cup.
Not even sorrow or fear can hold it.
In this world together, by miracle or fate,
we lean into its pleasures and pain,
each moment between us a living shrine.
I won’t ask for your blessing.
Already it is mine.

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

“Hold your heart up to the light. Don’t be afraid. Look at whatever’s inside with gentle acceptance—the pieces of fear tumbling loose with pieces of gratitude and grief, wonderment and confusion, loneliness and love, glass of every color. The colors will keep changing, and the patterns they reveal will change with them. Every day will have its own truth, every hour even, until all this turning and tumbling ends.”

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

“Every day is an invitation to begin again. Every day, an opportunity to follow the thread of our curiosity beyond the boundary of yesterday’s understanding. Every day, a graduation from who we were to who we will be. Every day, regardless of circumstances, worth some humble but jubilant pomp.”

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

“Together we bring truths to light that we simply can’t bring forward alone. Truths that smite and transfix us. Truths that startle us awake. Truths that, just when we think we’ve got them in hand, slip away from us, inviting us to search further. Truths that perhaps we can’t speak but must embody and live out, with vision and energy and will. Truths that make, and remake, this fragile and wondrous world.”

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

“Trust the flow of what’s true and necessary to take you where you want to end up. Be content if you can’t see around the bend just yet. Let whatever stretch of the river you’re on be enough for now—water rippling, birds singing, breeze catching the cattails, and sunshine kissing your face.”

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

“I believe in greeting each new day with a bow of gratitude. In nurturing the promise of children. In being faithful to friends. In being kind to strangers. In trying to love without clinging. In striking a fine balance between freedom and responsibility.

I believe that the universe is big and our place in it isn’t even a speck, yet what we do and say matters.

I believe that life is a fragile web of kinship. That death is always close.

I believe in the smallness of what I know, the value of what you know, the vastness of what we can know together, and the existence of what we can’t know at all.

I believe that what’s good for me is bound up with what’s good for you.

I believe in stepping over the line of what’s nice for the sake of what’s right.

I believe in everything that helps us to question who we are and to imagine who we might become, together.

I believe in you.”

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

Head the other way for once.
Backward to your usual forward.
South instead of north.
The trail won’t mind if you do.

Let the sun peer over
your other shoulder.
Let the mirror of the lake
reflect your shadow side.
The water will still hug the shore.

Go around the burial ground
only a half mile in
instead of hours later.
The dead will still keep
company with the sod.

Enter the open stretch of prairie
from the west instead of the east.
Its tall grasses will still bow their heads,
worshipping the breeze.

Rise up into the woods
instead of sloping down.
The trees will still welcome you.
The hawks will still watch,
the blue jays still squawk,
the squirrels still scatter.

Somewhere out in the middle of the loop
you’re apt to meet your old self
striding down the narrow path.
Smile to greet her.
Step aside to let her pass.

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR

“I press my palms together and bow to the beauty that you are. I bow to the beauty that you yourself need. I bow to the beauty that you give.”

—from STAYING POWER: WRITINGS FROM A PANDEMIC YEAR