https://awakin.org/read/ iJourney passages are a weekly email service that delivers a little bit of wisdom. It all started with couple folks getting together on Wednesdays in the Silicon Valley. en Thu, 15 Oct 2026 23:04:43 -0700 ServiceSpace iJourney passages are a weekly email service that delivers a little bit of wisdom. It all started with couple folks getting together on Wednesdays in the Silicon Valley. ServiceSpace tow@charityfocus.org no tow@charityfocus.org (ServiceSpace) https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2794 It’s the tendency to doubt, to waver. Of course, when you doubt, waver, or are uncertain, then the focus will be on the teachings, but you’ll tend to doubt everything else as well. So it’s good to get a handle on doubt, uncertainty, wavering: how it plays itself out in day-to-day life. It’s really interesting to watch on a day-to-day basis. How does it play out? “Should I have two of those fruits or should I just have one?” It can turn into a moment where everything stops: should I do this or should I do that; go forward or go back? We start to doubt everything, doubt can creep into everything and then it manifests in the teachings as well: doubting the teachings, doubting the practice, doubting oneself. “Can I do it? Can I not do it? Is there any point even to doing this? I’m not sure that I can do this.” All of it is doubt. So, being able to recognize that it’s doubt, and that’s all it is, one can then go forward. This is also a situation where mindfulness of the body is really helpful, in the sense that you’re never going to talk yourself into a resolution of doubt through the mind. You’ll never get everything figured out enough not to doubt, if doubt is the underlying, fallback position. Recognize how doubt manifests as a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling of hesitation, a feeling of discomfort around a particular decision or action. Then, by employing mindfulness of the body, you can cut through that and move forward. Sometimes it’s helpful to make a wrong decision and do something, at least not get caught in wavering and uncertainty, just as a part of training. That sense of wanting to be absolutely sure that one is doing something right before doing it paralyzes you and ties you up in knots. tow-2794 Mon, 12 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0700 It’s the tendency to doubt, to waver. Of course, when you doubt, waver, or are uncertain, then the focus will be on the teachings, but you’ll tend to doubt everything else as well. So it’s good to get a handle on doubt, uncertainty, wavering: how it plays itself out in day-to-day life. It’s really interesting to watch on a day-to-day basis. How does it play out? “Should I have two of those fruits or should I just have one?” It can turn into a moment where everything stops: should I do this or should I do that; go forward or go back? We start to doubt everything, doubt can creep into everything and then it manifests in the teachings as well: doubting the teachings, doubting the practice, doubting oneself. “Can I do it? Can I not do it? Is there any point even to doing this? I’m not sure that I can do this.” All of it is doubt. So, being able to recognize that it’s doubt, and that’s all it is, one can then go forward. This is also a situation where mindfulness of the body is really helpful, in the sense that you’re never going to talk yourself into a resolution of doubt through the mind. You’ll never get everything figured out enough not to doubt, if doubt is the underlying, fallback position. Recognize how doubt manifests as a feeling of uncertainty, a feeling of hesitation, a feeling of discomfort around a particular decision or action. Then, by employing mindfulness of the body, you can cut through that and move forward. Sometimes it’s helpful to make a wrong decision and do something, at least not get caught in wavering and uncertainty, just as a part of training. That sense of wanting to be absolutely sure that one is doing something right before doing it paralyzes you and ties you up in knots. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2651 “We do not know each other yet, we have not dared to be silent together.” What a priceless possession is the gift of speech! To be able to make sounds convey specific meanings and deliberate notions, to be able to put at the disposal of another the feelings that nestle within the inner life, to be able to reveal one’s self in symbols which make clear and do not betray—this is the miracle and the gift of the spoken word. It is a small wonder that people tend to worship the sound of their voice and to give to it an authority greater than anything that remains when all words have been said. Silence is not trusted; it is subversive; it must be hidden.  Fear of silence is the offering which we place upon the altar of words.  This is in part due to the richness of the experience of speech, and we do not wish to let it escape from us lest we descend once again into the vast region where there are no words, where there is no speech. It is important to remember that it is out of silence that all sounds come; it is in the stillness that the word is fashioned for the meaning it conveys.  Here the sound without sounds can be most clearly heard and meanings out of which all values come can be plumbed. We cannot conceive what sort of person is she or he who has never been silent.  We do not know each other yet...we have not yet dared to be silent together.  tow-2651 Mon, 05 Oct 2026 00:00:00 -0700 “We do not know each other yet, we have not dared to be silent together.” What a priceless possession is the gift of speech! To be able to make sounds convey specific meanings and deliberate notions, to be able to put at the disposal of another the feelings that nestle within the inner life, to be able to reveal one’s self in symbols which make clear and do not betray—this is the miracle and the gift of the spoken word. It is a small wonder that people tend to worship the sound of their voice and to give to it an authority greater than anything that remains when all words have been said. Silence is not trusted; it is subversive; it must be hidden.  Fear of silence is the offering which we place upon the altar of words.  This is in part due to the richness of the experience of speech, and we do not wish to let it escape from us lest we descend once again into the vast region where there are no words, where there is no speech. It is important to remember that it is out of silence that all sounds come; it is in the stillness that the word is fashioned for the meaning it conveys.  Here the sound without sounds can be most clearly heard and meanings out of which all values come can be plumbed. We cannot conceive what sort of person is she or he who has never been silent.  We do not know each other yet...we have not yet dared to be silent together.  https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2801 I was meditating with my cat the other day and all of a sudden she shouted,“What happened?!” I knew exactly what she meant, but encouragedher to say more – feeling that if she got it all out on the tableshe would sleep better that night. So I responded, “Tell me more, dear,”and she soulfully meowed: “Well, I was mingled with the sky. I was cometswhizzing here and there. I was suns in heat, hell – I wasgalaxies. But now look – I amlandlocked in fur.” To this I said, “I know exactly what you mean.” What to say about conversation between mystics? tow-2801 Mon, 28 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700 I was meditating with my cat the other day and all of a sudden she shouted,“What happened?!” I knew exactly what she meant, but encouragedher to say more – feeling that if she got it all out on the tableshe would sleep better that night. So I responded, “Tell me more, dear,”and she soulfully meowed: “Well, I was mingled with the sky. I was cometswhizzing here and there. I was suns in heat, hell – I wasgalaxies. But now look – I amlandlocked in fur.” To this I said, “I know exactly what you mean.” What to say about conversation between mystics? https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2817 For what it’s worth, in my world the only thing that truly helps to assimilate all of this into something that moves beyond mere coping to a place of connection is the simple act of getting back to work. By this, I don’t mean “work” as the strategic acquisition of wealth, productivity for its own sake, or simply doing more. I’m nodding to something more transcendent than all of that, more intentional and impactful. This kind of work is about manifesting our purpose, making a contribution, supporting those we care about, creatively turning woe into wonder, adding our voice to the discourse, making beauty and meaning, offering random acts of kindness, making uncredited interventions and notable accomplishments alike, pushing through inertia and barriers, speaking our mind with conviction, going the extra mile, doing what once seemed impossible. None of this implies that work of this sort needs to happen at a monumental scale to matter. It can be as simple as cleaning the kitchen before anyone else wakes up, or sprucing up the kids’ rooms while they’re at school — acts that may bring no overt recognition whatsoever. It can be finally cleaning out the garage, painting the fence, planting the garden. Beyond physical work, there’s also the realm of emotional and intellectual pursuits: starting that meditation class, picking up the old guitar, writing that letter or journal entry or essay, suspending disbelief long enough to really laugh or cry, calling a faraway friend. At a collective scale, there’s showing up to volunteer, helping a neighbor, raising one’s voice for a cause, supporting local arts in the community, making a climate-friendly life change, sharing something simply for the sake of adding a little splendor to the world. To me, this is the work of life, of living — what it takes to be both a human being and a human doing. There is, of course, another meaning of work. Many of us spend much of our lives doing work that can feel alienating, exhausting, or exploitative. At that level, it can be hard to think about “work” as a source of release or connection. But perhaps that is precisely why the word is worth reclaiming. There is work we do because we have to, and there is work that somehow returns us to ourselves. The latter may not look important from the outside. Nobody may applaud the washed dishes, the garden tended, the letter finally written, the friend called, the few minutes spent sitting quietly, the small kindness offered when nobody was watching. Yet perhaps these acts are not small at all. When the scale of the world’s troubles feels impossible to comprehend, the work immediately before us makes the massive condensable. It gives our hands somewhere to go. It turns abstraction into participation. And in doing so, something shifts. The thing we are working on may change, certainly. The room becomes cleaner. The seed enters the soil. The friend hears our voice. Someone receives a kindness. But perhaps we are being worked on as well. What begins as an effort to alter something outside ourselves can become a way of meeting our own helplessness, grief, gratitude, creativity, and capacity for care. The mundane becomes a place of resistance and recharge. Maybe this is part of what it means to be alive: not to wait until we can solve the whole thing, nor to imagine that every action must be consequential enough to justify itself, but simply to keep finding the next place where life is asking something of us — and to offer ourselves there. A meal. A garden. A conversation. A song. A neighbor. A cause. A moment of beauty no one asked us to make. There will always be more than we can repair. More than we can understand. More than we can carry. But there is also, almost always, some work of love close at hand. Let’s get back to it. tow-2817 Mon, 21 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700 For what it’s worth, in my world the only thing that truly helps to assimilate all of this into something that moves beyond mere coping to a place of connection is the simple act of getting back to work. By this, I don’t mean “work” as the strategic acquisition of wealth, productivity for its own sake, or simply doing more. I’m nodding to something more transcendent than all of that, more intentional and impactful. This kind of work is about manifesting our purpose, making a contribution, supporting those we care about, creatively turning woe into wonder, adding our voice to the discourse, making beauty and meaning, offering random acts of kindness, making uncredited interventions and notable accomplishments alike, pushing through inertia and barriers, speaking our mind with conviction, going the extra mile, doing what once seemed impossible. None of this implies that work of this sort needs to happen at a monumental scale to matter. It can be as simple as cleaning the kitchen before anyone else wakes up, or sprucing up the kids’ rooms while they’re at school — acts that may bring no overt recognition whatsoever. It can be finally cleaning out the garage, painting the fence, planting the garden. Beyond physical work, there’s also the realm of emotional and intellectual pursuits: starting that meditation class, picking up the old guitar, writing that letter or journal entry or essay, suspending disbelief long enough to really laugh or cry, calling a faraway friend. At a collective scale, there’s showing up to volunteer, helping a neighbor, raising one’s voice for a cause, supporting local arts in the community, making a climate-friendly life change, sharing something simply for the sake of adding a little splendor to the world. To me, this is the work of life, of living — what it takes to be both a human being and a human doing. There is, of course, another meaning of work. Many of us spend much of our lives doing work that can feel alienating, exhausting, or exploitative. At that level, it can be hard to think about “work” as a source of release or connection. But perhaps that is precisely why the word is worth reclaiming. There is work we do because we have to, and there is work that somehow returns us to ourselves. The latter may not look important from the outside. Nobody may applaud the washed dishes, the garden tended, the letter finally written, the friend called, the few minutes spent sitting quietly, the small kindness offered when nobody was watching. Yet perhaps these acts are not small at all. When the scale of the world’s troubles feels impossible to comprehend, the work immediately before us makes the massive condensable. It gives our hands somewhere to go. It turns abstraction into participation. And in doing so, something shifts. The thing we are working on may change, certainly. The room becomes cleaner. The seed enters the soil. The friend hears our voice. Someone receives a kindness. But perhaps we are being worked on as well. What begins as an effort to alter something outside ourselves can become a way of meeting our own helplessness, grief, gratitude, creativity, and capacity for care. The mundane becomes a place of resistance and recharge. Maybe this is part of what it means to be alive: not to wait until we can solve the whole thing, nor to imagine that every action must be consequential enough to justify itself, but simply to keep finding the next place where life is asking something of us — and to offer ourselves there. A meal. A garden. A conversation. A song. A neighbor. A cause. A moment of beauty no one asked us to make. There will always be more than we can repair. More than we can understand. More than we can carry. But there is also, almost always, some work of love close at hand. Let’s get back to it. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2798 Across the living world, abundance and decay, flourishing and loss, are braided together in an intimacy our industrial myths have taught us to forget. To stand within this season is to remember that we are not separate from these cycles but participants in them, creatures woven into a vast, animate conversation. Because the world does not move according to the linear promises of progress that have so thoroughly shaped the imagination of modernity. It moves more like a forest floor, where decay and emergence remain inseparable, where endings feed beginnings, and where unseen mycelial networks carry nourishment, memory, and possibility through darkness toward futures no single creature can fully anticipate. The sacred is not elsewhere. It is woven through these exchanges, through the reciprocity of soil and root, river and rain, grief and renewal. Perhaps the invitation of this season is not to seek firmer ground but to learn how to inhabit the trembling. Not as masters of a world in crisis, nor as victims awaiting rescue, but as participants in a living and unfinished conversation whose outcome remains beautifully, and sometimes terrifyingly, uncertain. To remain present at the threshold. To listen for what is emerging beneath the noise. To remember that even in times of unraveling, the world continues its patient work of weaving new relations from what has come apart. For once the sun reaches its greatest height, the wheel quietly begins its turn toward darkness. The Earth, as she so often does, reminds us that culmination and descent belong to the same story.   tow-2798 Mon, 14 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700 Across the living world, abundance and decay, flourishing and loss, are braided together in an intimacy our industrial myths have taught us to forget. To stand within this season is to remember that we are not separate from these cycles but participants in them, creatures woven into a vast, animate conversation. Because the world does not move according to the linear promises of progress that have so thoroughly shaped the imagination of modernity. It moves more like a forest floor, where decay and emergence remain inseparable, where endings feed beginnings, and where unseen mycelial networks carry nourishment, memory, and possibility through darkness toward futures no single creature can fully anticipate. The sacred is not elsewhere. It is woven through these exchanges, through the reciprocity of soil and root, river and rain, grief and renewal. Perhaps the invitation of this season is not to seek firmer ground but to learn how to inhabit the trembling. Not as masters of a world in crisis, nor as victims awaiting rescue, but as participants in a living and unfinished conversation whose outcome remains beautifully, and sometimes terrifyingly, uncertain. To remain present at the threshold. To listen for what is emerging beneath the noise. To remember that even in times of unraveling, the world continues its patient work of weaving new relations from what has come apart. For once the sun reaches its greatest height, the wheel quietly begins its turn toward darkness. The Earth, as she so often does, reminds us that culmination and descent belong to the same story.   https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2818 For many years my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it. However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories, too, as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related. tow-2818 Tue, 08 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0700 For many years my walks have taken me down an old fencerow in a wooded hollow on what was once my grandfather’s farm. A battered galvanized bucket is hanging on a fence post near the head of the hollow, and I never go by it without stopping to look inside. For what is going on in that bucket is the most momentous thing I know, the greatest miracle that I have ever heard of: it is making earth. The old bucket has hung there through many autumns, and the leaves have fallen around it and some have fallen into it. Rain and snow have fallen into it, and the fallen leaves have held the moisture and so have rotted. Nuts have fallen into it, or been carried into it by squirrels; mice and squirrels have eaten the meat of the nuts and left the shells; they and other animals have left their droppings; insects have flown into the bucket and died and decayed; birds have scratched in it and left their droppings or perhaps a feather or two. This slow work of growth and death, gravity and decay, which is the chief work of the world, has by now produced in the bottom of the bucket several inches of black humus. I look into that bucket with fascination because I am a farmer of sorts and an artist of sorts, and I recognize there an artistry and a farming far superior to mine, or to that of any human. I have seen the same process at work on the tops of boulders in a forest, and it has been at work immemorially over most of the land surface of the world. All creatures die into it, and they live by it. However small a landmark the old bucket is, it is not trivial. It is one of the signs by which I know my country and myself. And to me it is irresistibly suggestive in the way it collects leaves and other woodland sheddings as they fall through time. It collects stories, too, as they fall through time. It is irresistibly metaphorical. It is doing in a passive way what a human community must do actively and thoughtfully. A human community, too, must collect leaves and stories, and turn them to account. It must build soil, and build that memory of itself—in lore and story and song—that will be its culture. These two kinds of accumulation, of local soil and local culture, are intimately related. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2816 A real apology asks us to surrender our attachment to innocence, to see ourselves clearly as people capable of causing harm and capable of changing. Accountability asks not only, what did I do? but what made this possible? What did I benefit from not seeing? What have I learned to consider normal? The work of apology requires listening without defending our intentions, understanding that impact matters even when harm was not intended, and recognizing that remorse without change can become another form of avoidance. At its deepest level, apology is an act of love. The kind of love that is willing to tell the truth because the relationship matters. It asks us to move beyond the binary of guilt and innocence and into the much more difficult territory of responsibility. It asks what we are willing to repair, what we are willing to relinquish, and who we are willing to become. We need the imagination to believe that accountability does not have to end in shame. It can lead somewhere. Perhaps the opposite of fragmentation is not agreement, but our capacity to stay in relationship while telling the truth about what happened. Perhaps liberation begins when we no longer have to choose between accountability and love. tow-2816 Mon, 31 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700 A real apology asks us to surrender our attachment to innocence, to see ourselves clearly as people capable of causing harm and capable of changing. Accountability asks not only, what did I do? but what made this possible? What did I benefit from not seeing? What have I learned to consider normal? The work of apology requires listening without defending our intentions, understanding that impact matters even when harm was not intended, and recognizing that remorse without change can become another form of avoidance. At its deepest level, apology is an act of love. The kind of love that is willing to tell the truth because the relationship matters. It asks us to move beyond the binary of guilt and innocence and into the much more difficult territory of responsibility. It asks what we are willing to repair, what we are willing to relinquish, and who we are willing to become. We need the imagination to believe that accountability does not have to end in shame. It can lead somewhere. Perhaps the opposite of fragmentation is not agreement, but our capacity to stay in relationship while telling the truth about what happened. Perhaps liberation begins when we no longer have to choose between accountability and love.