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 Fri, 25 Sep 2026 22:37:10 -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=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. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2813 Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be betterTo paint a picture, or write a letter,Bake a cake, or plant a seed;Ponder the difference between want and need?Dust if you must, but there's not much time,With rivers to swim, and mountains to climb;Music to hear, and books to read;Friends to cherish, and life to lead.Dust if you must, but the world's out thereWith the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair;A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,This day will not come around again.Dust if you must, but bear in mind,Old age will come and it's not kind.And when you go (and go you must)You, yourself, will make more dust. tow-2813 Mon, 24 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700 Dust if you must, but wouldn't it be betterTo paint a picture, or write a letter,Bake a cake, or plant a seed;Ponder the difference between want and need?Dust if you must, but there's not much time,With rivers to swim, and mountains to climb;Music to hear, and books to read;Friends to cherish, and life to lead.Dust if you must, but the world's out thereWith the sun in your eyes, and the wind in your hair;A flutter of snow, a shower of rain,This day will not come around again.Dust if you must, but bear in mind,Old age will come and it's not kind.And when you go (and go you must)You, yourself, will make more dust. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2814   Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other's stories once again. Most of the stories we are told now are written by novelists and screenwriters, acted out by actors and actresses, stories that have beginnings and endings, stories that are not real. The stories we can tell each other have no beginning and ending. They are a front-row seat to the real experience. Even though they may have happened in a different time or place they have a familiar feel. In some way they are about us, too. Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life's kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people's stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories. Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life's events 'behind us' and get on with our living. After we stop we see that certain of life's issues will be with us for as long as we live. We will pass through them again and again, each time with a new story, each time with a greater understanding, until they become indistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom. It's the way life teaches us how to live. When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we send together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone's lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than shares and participants. The kitchen table is a level playing field. Everyone's story matter. The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage. Most parents know the importance of telling children their own story, over and over again, so that they come to know in the telling who they are and to whom they belong. At the kitchen table we do this for each other. Hidden in all stories in the One story. The more we listen, the clearer that Story becomes. Our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains us, is in this story. The stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope, and healing, of loneliness and the end of loneliness. Stories about God. In telling them, we are telling each other the human story. Stories that touch us in this place of common humanness awaken us and weave us together as a family once again. tow-2814 Mon, 17 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700   Everybody is a story. When I was a child, people sat around kitchen tables and told their stories. We don't do that so much anymore. Sitting around the table telling stories is not just a way of passing time. It is the way the wisdom gets passed along. The stuff that helps us to live a life worth remembering. Despite the awesome powers of technology many of us still do not live very well. We may need to listen to each other's stories once again. Most of the stories we are told now are written by novelists and screenwriters, acted out by actors and actresses, stories that have beginnings and endings, stories that are not real. The stories we can tell each other have no beginning and ending. They are a front-row seat to the real experience. Even though they may have happened in a different time or place they have a familiar feel. In some way they are about us, too. Real stories take time. We stopped telling stories when we started to lose that sort of time, pausing time, reflecting time, wondering time. Life rushes us along and few people are strong enough to stop on their own. Most often, something unforeseen stops us and it is only then we have the time to take a seat at life's kitchen table. To know our own story and tell it. To listen to other people's stories. To remember that the real world is made of just such stories. Until we stop ourselves or, more often, have been stopped, we hope to put certain of life's events 'behind us' and get on with our living. After we stop we see that certain of life's issues will be with us for as long as we live. We will pass through them again and again, each time with a new story, each time with a greater understanding, until they become indistinguishable from our blessings and our wisdom. It's the way life teaches us how to live. When we haven't the time to listen to each other's stories we seek out experts to tell us how to live. The less time we send together at the kitchen table, the more how-to books appear in the stores and on our bookshelves. But reading such books is a very different thing than listening to someone's lived experience. Because we have stopped listening to each other we may even have forgotten how to listen, stopped learning how to recognize meaning and fill ourselves from the ordinary events of our lives. We have become solitary; readers and watchers rather than shares and participants. The kitchen table is a level playing field. Everyone's story matter. The wisdom in the story of the most educated and powerful person is often not greater than the wisdom in the story of a child, and the life of a child can teach us as much as the life of a sage. Most parents know the importance of telling children their own story, over and over again, so that they come to know in the telling who they are and to whom they belong. At the kitchen table we do this for each other. Hidden in all stories in the One story. The more we listen, the clearer that Story becomes. Our true identity, who we are, why we are here, what sustains us, is in this story. The stories at every kitchen table are about the same things, stories of owning, having and losing, stories of sex, of power, of pain, of wounding, of courage, hope, and healing, of loneliness and the end of loneliness. Stories about God. In telling them, we are telling each other the human story. Stories that touch us in this place of common humanness awaken us and weave us together as a family once again. https://awakin.org/read/view.php?tid=2811 Our mind is not our enemy. It is a sacred gift. It helps us think, question, imagine, and understand the world. But the mind is not the place where life reaches its deepest fulfillment. It is the path that gently leads us to the heart. The mind seeks answers.The heart becomes the answer. The mind can gather endless knowledge, but only the heart can transform knowledge into wisdom. The mind can plan a life of success, but only the heart can awaken a life of meaning. When the mind walks alone, it often seeks certainty, control, and achievement. When it walks with the heart, those same abilities become instruments of compassion, courage, and service. Our greatest wealth is not found in what we know, own, or accomplish. It is found in the qualities that quietly blossom when the mind bows to the heart—gratitude that asks for nothing, kindness that expects nothing in return, love that includes everyone, and generosity that flows naturally. The journey from the mind to the heart is not a journey of distance but of surrender. We do not arrive there by becoming smarter. We arrive by becoming softer. Every moment of deep listening, every act of forgiveness, every humble offering, and every silent expression of compassion gently opens the door. As the heart unfolds, something beautiful happens. The mind does not disappear—it becomes illuminated. Thought begins to serve love. Intelligence begins to serve humanity. Success begins to serve the well-being of all. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly rich: not to have more, but to need less; not to stand above others, but to belong with them; not to collect more for ourselves, but to become a channel through which love, compassion, and generosity quietly flow into the world. Our mind is not our enemy. It is our beloved friend. And when it humbly walks hand in hand with the heart, it carries us to the greatest treasure we will ever discover—the boundless richness of a heart awake to love. tow-2811 Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0700 Our mind is not our enemy. It is a sacred gift. It helps us think, question, imagine, and understand the world. But the mind is not the place where life reaches its deepest fulfillment. It is the path that gently leads us to the heart. The mind seeks answers.The heart becomes the answer. The mind can gather endless knowledge, but only the heart can transform knowledge into wisdom. The mind can plan a life of success, but only the heart can awaken a life of meaning. When the mind walks alone, it often seeks certainty, control, and achievement. When it walks with the heart, those same abilities become instruments of compassion, courage, and service. Our greatest wealth is not found in what we know, own, or accomplish. It is found in the qualities that quietly blossom when the mind bows to the heart—gratitude that asks for nothing, kindness that expects nothing in return, love that includes everyone, and generosity that flows naturally. The journey from the mind to the heart is not a journey of distance but of surrender. We do not arrive there by becoming smarter. We arrive by becoming softer. Every moment of deep listening, every act of forgiveness, every humble offering, and every silent expression of compassion gently opens the door. As the heart unfolds, something beautiful happens. The mind does not disappear—it becomes illuminated. Thought begins to serve love. Intelligence begins to serve humanity. Success begins to serve the well-being of all. Perhaps this is what it means to be truly rich: not to have more, but to need less; not to stand above others, but to belong with them; not to collect more for ourselves, but to become a channel through which love, compassion, and generosity quietly flow into the world. Our mind is not our enemy. It is our beloved friend. And when it humbly walks hand in hand with the heart, it carries us to the greatest treasure we will ever discover—the boundless richness of a heart awake to love.