Why do I forget You, abandon You?
You who are wholeness,
You who are home, always now, always present,
giving what every cell in me yearns for--
to collapse into Your warm breath of Life;
defenses drop, naked I be,
cherished solely for my nakedness,
my void, my forgetfulness.

Silence pregnant with all sounds,
I come back, prodigal that I am--
bruised, tired, wired,
To be undone again by Your embrace.

The thirst for God, the desire for unitive knowledge, is not something foreign to our nature. This desire is already in the human heart; the only reason we fail to perceive it is because it is usually covered up with petty worries and egotistical ambitions. Once these are removed, the true desire, buried in the deepest recesses of the human mind, will shine forth of itself and, like a flame, will leap toward heaven, which is its true Home.

In this life we are to become heaven
So that Love may find a home here.

It has been said many times:
HOME is WITHIN you.
You are the light of the world.
Returning Home means remembering
your own true self: Light!

The path around our home
is also the ground of awakening.

Through the cycles and seasons of our lives' as we continue to grow in awareness, we begin to feel more at home in the world. We begin to appreciate and accept who we are... We move from periods of joyful expansion into a dark night of the soul. We seem to reap the harvest of the sustained practice of attention and compassion and come to know ourselves in a new and more forgiving light, only to forget and return to what we thought were old, discarded ways. We suffer and we experience great delight. Yet deep within is a place of understanding, and to find this place is to come home.

Earth is our home ... the largest living creature in our solar system. The land, the water, the air, and all the things that live on and in them form a gigantic community, an enormous cell. Here fungi, eagles, toads, worms, grasses, mosquitoes, ferns, people, dolphins, spiders, oak trees, and lions — up to ten million separately distinguishable forms of life or species — share Earth's environments. Whatever happens to one part, for good or ill, ultimately affects us all, the whole Earth: our home of abundant riches and indescribable beauty.

Migratory birds fly very high, for three reasons. First, at a high altitude they can see better where they are going. Secondly, they are above the predatory birds that may prey on them. Thirdly, in that rarefied atmosphere they can fly very swiftly and easily. That is a parable of the way of prayer. Our souls are migratory souls. Our home is not here, but with God, to whom we seek to rise on the wings of prayer. We want to get high to see where we are going ... to rise above the noises, the fuss, and all the complications that distract and rob our lives of their own spiritual quality ... to pass swiftly to our true home, the communion of our souls with God.