that must be achieved. On the other hand, freedom is always interesting. When I was without what I should do and might do and could do, I just did what was obvious and was given to me. I experienced that as one of the shapes of love.

As I see it, the world arrives out of what is unknown and unimagined. Everything just appears as it is, coming toward us; it is a gift, not a product, and it stumbles over us, crashes into us, or comes to fetch us. I suppose it helps to show up without much going on in our minds. That’s the discipline—the bit about not having much going on in our m

It might be possible to find our song, our course of action, ourselves, in any situation. This finding wouldn’t depend on preset moves—it could be the wrong move that will save us.

When my mother’s ashes came back from the crematorium, my family spent a couple of days staring at the plastic box that held them. Then we took the box to the old cast iron bridge across the Tamar River. Both bridge and river had been continual companions to her life. I undid a surprising number of layers and poured the ashes into the water below.

It was like the fellow who lost his car keys in the dark alley but was looking for them under the streetlight. “There’s more light here,” he explained. I hoped that if I sat very, very still and didn’t have thoughts, then lightning would strike. Tricky.

Some people fight boredom in meditation, yet to be bored can be a good thing; it can mean the beginning of an appreciation for bare, plain qualities. Enduring your own consciousness is so valuable, I thought, Why shouldn’t a koan be there just to bore you? In this way, might not you appreciate your mind even when it is not being amused or having a

We take our minds for granted, imagining that they will behave themselves, but they don’t. It can’t be assumed that we will think what we intend to think, and we don’t always do what we tell ourselves to do. We might believe that we are our thoughts and feelings, but our thoughts and feelings are objects in the world, just like tables and mirrors.

It seemed very funny that I had struggled so long to find a place in the universe when I couldn’t fall out of the universe. It was as if a wave were struggling to understand what the sea was. I began laughing.

The story in our family was that Mum was often difficult. I had evidence, memories; psychotherapists had agreed with these memories. But after sitting in that room, not wanting anyone to be different, I didn’t want anything about my life to have been different either. My sister and I started to tell each other Mum’s Famous Outrages—the “Can you bel