We have fallen out of belonging. Consequently, when we stand before crucial thresholds in our lives, we have no rituals to protect, encourage, and guide us as we cross over into the unknown.

Solitude is one of the most precious things in the human spirit. It is different from loneliness. When you are lonely, you become acutely conscious of your own separation. Solitude can be a homecoming to your deepest belonging.

Ironically, your trust in your inner belonging radically alters your outer belonging. Unless you find belonging in your solitude, your external longing will remain needy and driven.

The beauty of being human is the capacity and desire for intimacy. Yet we know that even those who are most intimate remain strange to us. Like children, we often “make strange” with each other.

The human heart is a theater of longing.

You travel certainly, in every sense of the word. But you take with you everything that you have been, just as the landscape stores up its own past. Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.

When you learn to love and let yourself be loved, you come home to the hearth of your own spirit. You are warm and sheltered. Your are completely at one in the house of your own longing and belonging.

[We] have to let go in order to be; we have to stop forcing ourselves, or we will never enter our own belonging.

Because you were once at home somewhere, you are never an alien anywhere.