The One Life We're Given

Thorndike Press, July 2017
and as an audiobook from Simon & Schuster, July 2016

Availble on Amazon

AUDIO DESCRIPTION

This new audiobook affirms how precious this one life is and opens the chance we have to be fully alive and to be of use to each other and the world.  Drawn from my years of teaching, I'm exploring how our hard work and authenticity readies us for meaning and grace.  I'm looking to unfold how, by loving what's before us and concentrating on what's particular and personal, we can begin to make sense of our experience.  Over time, we uncover the twin callings of enlivening our soul and enlivening the world become one, and how our sincerity and labor help us to survive and thrive.  Deepening the short-chapter format I used in The Book of Awakening, I'm trying to reveal how living wholeheartedly brings us into the field of grace, that larger current of life that awakens us.

By fully living the one life we're given, we're led to the wisdom that waits in our heart.  There is no other way.  To make the most of being here, we're required to learn when to try and when to let go.  This is our initiation into grace.  The gift and practice of being human centers on the effort to restore what matters and, when in trouble, to make good use of our heart.  No one quite knows how to do this, but learn it we must.  Our path to love and truth depend on this journey.  The sections of this audiobook point to how we might truly inhabit the one life we're given: by getting closer to life, loving what you do, finding what can last, and by being kind and useful.

From an early age, we're taught to try hard, to do our best, to give our all.  And so, our first encounter with effort is how hard we try to get from here to there, from inexperience to experience, from apprenticeship to mastery.  This kind of work is necessary to accomplish things in the world.  But just as we're clearing a path, we experience heartbreak and loss.  Things don't go as planned.  We lose our way.  And without warning, we're thrust into a life of transformation, which no one can escape.  Now we're introduced to a different sense of effort that asks us to put things down in order to discover beauty and wonder.  As our inner life unfolds, we grow from ignorance to truth and from loneliness to love.  This kind of work is necessary to join with the things of the world.

We clearly need both: to accomplish things and to join with things.  Yet while trying so hard to get from here to there leads to achievement and even excellence, it's giving our all to grow like a root that lets us blossom in the world.  Ultimately, the effort to grow is more life-giving than the effort to get.  It's how we grow that leads in time to meaning and grace, a journey we can't control or aim, but only enter when we agree to be baptized in the sea of aliveness.