Ahhh, dear friends. It’s wonderful to be with you. Thank you for your sharing into our circle. I’m Lucy, from Fremantle, Western Australia. Others here have spoken of a return… a return to a (new) beginning, and so it is for me. I first heard David recount this story of his conversation with Brother David nearly fifteen years ago, listening to a crummy bootleg tape while chopping a pumpkin in a remote part of France. It was a revelation that continues to guide me.

To me, the practice of wholeheartedness is gathering up all of the elements of my life so that it can be held by a single thread. And this is the thread that in the ripening of the fruit, is broken, so that the fruit falls into the lap of the world.

I am sitting on the edge of myself at those words “rotting on the vine” … I feel the real possibility of that and with all my heart do not want this.

So I guess that leaves me with wholeheartedness as a great, great willingness. A willingness to give this that I have, flawed as it is. To let myself fall in ripeness from the vine. To give. To let my weight drop. To let my longing call me down into the water where I am “pleased to be carried.”