So I can't save the world— can't save even myself, can't wrap my arms around every frightened child, can’t foster peace among nations, can’t bring love to all who feel unlovable. So I practice opening my heart right here in this room and being gentle with my insufficiency. I practice walking down the street heart first. And if it is insufficient to share love, I will practice loving anyway. I want to converse about truth, about trust. I want to invite compassion into every interaction. One willing heart can’t stop a war. One willing heart can’t feed all the hungry. And sometimes, daunted by a task too big, I tell myself what’s the use of trying? But today, the invitation is clear: to be ridiculously courageous in love. To open the heart like a lilac in May, knowing freeze is possible and opening anyway. To take love seriously. To give love wildly. To race up to the world as if I were a puppy, adoring and unjaded, stumbling on my own exuberance. To feel the shock of indifference, of anger, of cruelty, of fear, and stay open. To love as if it matters, as if the world depends on it.
Belonging And if it’s true we are alone, we are alone together, the way blades of grass are alone, but exist as a field. Sometimes I feel it, the green fuse that ignites us, the wild thrum that unites us, an inner hum that reminds us of our shared humanity. Just as thirty-five trillion red blood cells join in one body to become one blood. Just as one hundred thirty-six thousand notes make up one symphony. Alone as we are, our small voices weave into the one big conversation. Our actions are essential to the one infinite story of what it is to be alive. When we feel alone, we belong to the grand communion of those who sometimes feel alone— we are the dust, the dust that hopes, a rising of dust, a thrill of dust, the dust that dances in the light with all other dust, the dust that makes the world.