Give up the fight For some other moment Some other life Than here, and now Give up the longing for some other world The wishing for other choices to make other songs to sing other bodies, other ages, other countries, other stakes Purge the past; forgive the future— for each come too soon.

What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath— the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your life. Center down. And when your...

We all have our foibles; pieces of ourselves that we both admire and occasionally revile. These gifts and struggles exist in tandem.

Before I birthed my baby, he was a possibility, a kick against my insides. With that first cry, first breath, he became a person in the world.

Pleasure reminds us to enjoy being alive and on purpose... Pleasure—embodied, connected pleasure—is one of the way we know when we are free. That we are always free. That we always have the power to co-create the world. Pleasure helps us move through the times that are unfair, through grief and...

We have so many opportunities to bless each other in this world, but they don’t always announce themselves as moments of profound transformation.

It was disruptive and strange to know that someone had died to bring this hope, and to wonder how the donor’s family mourned at the same time we rejoiced.

This date marks the anniversary of a public demonstration by intersex people and their allies at the annual conference of the American Academy of Pediatrics in 1996, at which they condemned nonconsensual surgeries on intersex people.

May I always remember that Tango, like life, is a dance of the people. It’s meant to be shared, not practiced in isolation.

Rain falls upon the surface of the earth, and pulled by gravity each drop begins to flow downhill. Drop merges with drop, flowing together, into a trickle, a streamlet, a creek, a mighty river, flowing onward. Some of the water seeps down into the earth itself, as groundwater, or deep aquifers,...

As flame is to spirit, so spirit is to breath, and breath to song. Though we extinguish the flame in this sanctuary, may we tend it in our hearts until we meet again.

The tides slowly wear away at the ragged and scraped edges where we tore ourselves out, and what is left behind is as smooth as breath.

We need to stop banishing embodiment from our worship.

Oh, divine Love, With the kindling of this flame, may we realize and love our true selves: Our true, round belly selves. Our true, bags under our eyes, selves. Our true, naturally hairy, selves. Our true, wrinkles on our skin, selves. May our self-love help keep our chalice ablaze.

no one can rename you Other, it can’t stick, as you offer the gift of being and saying who you are.

A haircut, a cup of coffee, or just an honest “How are you?” can be transformed into a powerful moment between two people living in a hard world.

I saw a woman surrounded by the pressures to conform to adulthood, being the adult she always wanted to be when she was a child. She was as God made her, not who everyone else wanted her to be.

It is deeply spiritual work to learn to treat ourselves with compassion; to learn to see ourselves, if only in moments, the same way we look at something or someone we find beautiful: a newborn baby, the ocean, a sunset.

Outside of the meditation hall, we plan for the future and think of the past. But so often we replay past regrets and worry about future events to the point where we’re no longer present in the present.

Traditions and habits can be changed or broken and that’s not always bad. It doesn’t mean we didn’t learn or like what we did in the past, it just means that we moved on to something else and that’s okay too.