THE SMILE AT THE HEART OF THINGS: Brief Excerpts
"In the lead-up to the communion ritual, the priest reads a passage from the Bible in which Christ says, “Take, eat, this is my body.” Obviously the godly dude is not suggesting to his disciples that they actually slice him up and chow down! Suppose what those words are really saying is, “Take, eat, this is my substance—this is the essence of me.” Instead of literally eating someone’s body, we’re metaphorically eating a self-contained “unit” of substance. We’re eating bread. The communion ceremony is a ritualized enactment of “Give us each day our daily bread.” It’s another way of saying we’re hungry and a Twinkie is not enough. " —from Nourishment
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"When I’m pulling weeds
in my garden on a warm Saturday afternoon in August, I pause once in a while to
wipe the sweat off my eyebrows. As I stretch my arms and glance upward, I see
the sky and it’s blue. The clouds are white. The smell of the dirt fills my
lungs as I take a long, slow breath, the mud is caked on my fingers, and my
lower back is sore. All the centuries of epistemological conjecturing about
what’s real never enter my mind. I know what’s real. What I see and touch and
smell is real. The whole universe is real, and I’m real because I’m part of it." —from Honesty
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"The wind was blowing through the pine trees—I must have heard it a thousand times before. But until that moment I was too focused on myself to hear it. The sound came from another world—foreign, yet strangely familiar, as if it had always been there, like an ancient, unknown voice inside me. Rising and falling, sometimes near and sometimes far, a whisper, then a roar that penetrated my skin and flowed through my body, but I had no body, I didn’t exist, there was only the wind. This sound was beautiful, but a different kind of beauty, a beauty that squeezed me and wrung me out and shook me until there was nothing left to shake." —from Beauty
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"A geologist like my father looks beneath the surface, trying to make the invisible visible. But there was something going on beneath the surface of me that was more interesting than any Precambrian granite. Maybe those primeval dinosaurs and ancient civilizations were really part of my own psyche, a part that I needed to dig into if I were to have any hope of being more than a shallow and embryonic teenager. Maybe what I really wanted to be was a geologist of the soul." —from Depth
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"I became an artist because I thought it was the only way to find the truth about myself—to dig, deep down, below the granite, where the invisible water flowed. Turns out my father heard the sound of the same quiet water. When he was searching the earth’s interior for that ancient layer of rock where the oil was, he was also searching his own interior for the ancient layers inside him. Searching for depth. Of all the gifts he gave me—all the knowledge, all the generosity, all the time and attention and love—that was the gift that made the difference. The gift of himself. His interior life. His search." —from Depth
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"We all have a deep, hidden connection to something that feeds us and holds us together. When that invisible umbilical cord is severed, the ground opens up and all you can see beneath you is darkness, and there’s no longer a wall to hold back the darkness, and it comes inside and there’s nothing you can do about it except scream into the darkness." —from Hunger
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"Then I saw, as if for the first time, the trees. They were not just trees, they were entities, souls, like me. Their branches were straining, straining toward the light, and the light was beautiful beyond words. Beyond words. I stood there for what seemed like an eternity, drinking in the beauty. The beauty of the light. The trees, straining, reaching—they were hungry—hungry for the light. What was the sun, really? Was it just a big ball of gas in the sky, powering the earth’s systems through hydrogen fusion? It was that, and something else. What was a tree, really? Was it just a photosynthesis machine that ingested light so it could grow? It was that, and something else. At that moment I was a tree, and I was hungry too. The light poured into me, and I opened all the doors of my soul and let it in, and the whole universe was nothing but light and the hunger for the light. All I could do was give myself to the hunger." —from Hunger