The Holy Grail is the part-historical, part-mythical vessel found in the Arthurian legend of Perceval. Perceval sets out on a quest to retrieve the G… - Toko-pa Turner

Occasionally you meet someone with whom you can dive right in, but in general it’s better to move slowly into closeness with others, because it is a worse thing to call someone home and leave them, than to not call them home at all.

Human beings have a natural urge to worship that “something greater” which coheres us, but we, in modernity, are living in a kind of spiritual cul-de-sac where our gifts only serve the human community. Unlike the many shamanic cultures that practice dreamwork, ritual, and thanksgiving, Westerners have forgotten what indigenous people understand to be cardinal: that this world owes its life to the unseen. Every hunt and every harvest, every death, and every birth is distinguished by ceremony for that which we cannot see, feeding back that which feeds us. I believe our epidemic alienation is, in good part, the felt negligence of that reciprocity.

At the very heart of ‘belonging’ is the word ‘long.’ To be-long to something is to stay with it for the long haul. It is an active choice we make to a relationship, to a place, to our body, to a life because we value it. Even knowing that it may not be all that we hope it to be, we are keeping the long view of what is possible, and our life becomes an offering to making it so.