the ones who found me.

dignity under suffering, and the quiet power of meaning - the last of the human freedoms, he called it: that everything can be taken from you but the way you choose to meet it.

the same journey we all take - the leaving, the searching, the river. his story is ours. and the truest thing in it: wisdom can't be handed to you, only lived. (no wonder it reached me.)

this one did something to me. i've read so many books, so many dry even in spirituality - but some writers carry a real presence in their words, an energy. this one had it. (and those powerful beyond measure lines the whole world quotes - they're hers, from this very book.)

the soul mapped as a castle of seven rooms - the long journey inward, toward union with the divine. she didn't call it higher consciousness, or enlightenment; those are my words. she called it the interior - the deepening layers of our soul, our humanity, our being and our joy. she wrote of the prayer of quiet, and of humility working soft as a bee at the honeycomb.

her contemporary - the two of them reformed the Carmelites together. the dark night of the soul: that the dark is not the end of the way, the dark is the way through. he wrote some of his most luminous lines from a tiny prison cell. a very good book.

the little way - small, ordinary things done with great love. she lived it overlooked, unremarkable to the very sisters beside her - and her greatness stayed hidden until after she was gone. her sincerity, her honesty, smallness held as the truest path - all of it quietly, in the face of being dismissed.

how he turned a careless, hedonistic life all the way around toward God. when you're called, you're called - and it takes a thousand shapes. it's beautiful. and the line that stays with me: our hearts are restless, until they rest.

the monk who hid away. who hasn't wanted to be safe, to disappear into a monastery somewhere? but near the end of his life - to many people's surprise - he turned back toward the world, weaving Zen Buddhism and the Eastern contemplatives into his writing. not to leave his faith, but to find the one thing underneath them all - the kinship of every tradition. people came to him with their real questions - in the monastery, and out in the world. i understood his story, because it's ours - our place in humanity, as we see fit, as we come to understand it, as we simply choose it. it moved me.

i read one book, years ago, and one line stayed: meditation is love. i came up the other side and found it the other way round - love is meditation. i write about it in Journey of Awakening and Higher Consciousness . two paths, one peak.

i went to a few of his seminars. he says so much in so few words - and i'm someone who loves words, who uses a lot of them to reach the feeling. he gets there in one or two. i love where he begins; i just keep walking, into the aliveness on the other side.

a brain scientist who had a stroke and felt the self dissolve. it struck me because i lived something like it - not a stroke, but true stillness. and on the far side of stillness there is only one realization: we are all one. i felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there, she said. that's it exactly - the shared humanity, the beauty of all that is.

when you know your why, you can move heaven and earth. it's where the drive lives - the fire to thrive. not surviving, but living, giving, sharing.

not a teacher, exactly - his poetry just soothed my heart. deep, rich, real, raw, true - it reached the ache without explaining it. some nights, that was everything.

one line i never let go of: who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. he wrote it to a woman trying to see clearly - your vision only clears, he said, when you look into your own heart.

i don't know much about him - but one line i've carried, and used, more than once: the real voyage of discovery is not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. (he wrote it longer and stranger - about seeing through a hundred other eyes - but that's the shape that stayed with me.)

i read it so long ago the memory has gone soft. but it was reaching at something true - that the divine is met not by thinking, but by love. by love may He be gotten and holden, it says, but by thought never.

the book, and the film. i understood the meaning he was after - he told it as a story, and a story awakens what a lesson can't. his Socrates, the old mentor at the gas station - i always wanted to meet someone like that. his line i kept: there are no ordinary moments.