When did we see each other face-to-face? Not until you saw into my cracks and I saw into yours. Before that, we were just looking at ideas of each other, like looking at your window shade but never seeing inside. But once the vessel cracks, the light can get in. The light can get out.

There’s a crack (or cracks) in everyone…that’s how the light of God gets in.

We are all broken — that’s how the light gets in.

Forget the perfect offering. Everything is flawed. It's the cracks that let the Light in...

to allow our hearts to break, to soften them, to sink deeply into the knowing that everything will fall, everything will pass, everything will crumble, can be the great portal to awakening. We simply stop taking everything for granted. We stop living in “tomorrow” and turn toward the living day. We stop seeking our happiness in the future, clinging to the promises of others, and begin to break open into a bigger happiness that is rooted in presence, and truth, that allows for the coming but also the going of things, that accepts the little deaths as they happen each day, the disappointments, the losses, the shattered expectations, the good-byes. The Unexpected becomes our friend, a constant companion. We break open into bitter-sweetness, into fragility and utter vulnerability, into the gift of every moment, of every encounter with a friend, a lover, a stranger.

There is a crack in everything

There is a crack, a crack, in everything. That's how the light gets in.

There is cracks, cracks, in everything, that's how the light gets in.' I had cracks but not the hope.

Everything has a crack in it; that's how the light gets in.

Every truth that we may think complete will prove itself untruth at the moment of shipwreck.

When things fall apart and we can’t get the pieces back together, when we lose something dear to us, when they whole thing is just not working and we don’t know what to do, this is the time when the natural warmth of tenderness, the warmth of empathy and kindness, are just waiting to be uncovered, just waiting to be embraced. This is our chance to come out of our self-protecting bubble and to realize that we are never alone. This is our chance to finally understand that wherever we go, everyone we meet is essentially just like us. Our own suffering, if we turn toward it, can open us to a loving relationship with the world.

Light will someday split you open; even if your life is now a cage.

Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.

There is a brokenness out of which comes the unbroken . . .
And a fragility out of whose depths emerges strength. There is a hollow space too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness we are sanctioned into being.
There is a cry deeper than all sounds
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole . . .