It is not your business to determine how good it is, nor how valuable it is, nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep the channel open.

It is everyone’s business. Mind and body seek those moments where we feel most in tune with the world flowing through us. It might be fly-fishing, throwing clay, playing music, walking the dog— whatever forms of work and play kindle the radiance of our truest selves, joyful and loving, fearless and generous.

There’s a power flowing through us from our first breath to our last, and to be present when that window opens–first and last–is to come as close as we can to the mystery of our being here. The labor of birth and the work of dying both entail a letting go, a surrender of self to the flow of things. There was a time when the work of birthing and dying was done at home, with family gathered round, a powerful affirmation of the mystery and fragility of life and of our connectedness to all of nature’s comings and goings. Our culture’s discomfort with this work, our inclination to hand responsibility for it over to the business of medicine, is a key sign of our dislocation from our own nature and from our place in the community of living things.

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There’s a power flowing through us that reveals itself most directly, perhaps, in dancers and athletes, whose bodies are their means of expression. There’s a wonderful moment in the film, Chariots of Fire, when Eric Liddell’s sister asks him why he wants to compete in the Olympics rather than do God’s work as a missionary. He answers, “When I run, I feel His pleasure.” And when I see my daughter’s discipline, passion, and grace on the dance floor, I always think of this wonderful passage in a letter from Martha Graham to Agnes De Mille:

There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and be lost. The world will not have it.