We are meant to be connected to our where, to the sensory experience of it. The simple beholding of place can slow your heart and steady your breath. It is quite the protective force.

Just as outer voices can lead you away from the well of your own selfhood, they also have the capacity to usher you into new depths of it. And if practiced right, your calling into selfhood may enhance the sound of self in someone else.

When Tupac said only God could judge him, this was not mere bombast; it was naming the truth that no one else can be trusted to judge, to do this “accounting,” certainly not the ones whose greed and systemic oppression is the impetus for our desperate rule breaking.

It was one of those rare occasions that I knew was becoming a part of me as I lived it. The moment wasn’t just happiness, though that was a quality of it. It was a kind of pleasure that made me feel a part of something—where beauty meets belonging.

To survive it, we must gain a certain loyalty to our selfhood. We must free the part of ourselves that seeks to protect the self. I’ve accepted that the whole of my life will be a pilgrimage toward the sound of the genuine in me.

Fear becomes anxiety when it makes its home in you. Its chief attachment is not memory or villain or situation or future; its chief attachment and subject is you. This strange and imprecise fear can torment the body and enshroud all other fear experiences.

Ask me what I want to be, but not before you ask me who I want to be. Ask me who I want to be, but not before you ask me the more searing question of who I am.

I have not found a better portrait of joy. Sorrow and celebration all mixing together in a holy cacophony. A collective so loud that weeping and laughter were made one. A sound so loud that it was heard by others, even those far away.

A fidelity to the true self is a fidelity to truth. I won’t apologize for this.