When the day is too bright or the night too dark and your feelings are like an avalanche barreling down the mountain of events outside your control, when you look down and you are falling and you cannot see the bottom, or when your pain has eaten you and you are nothing but an empty hungry hole, then there is an opportunity for giving.

Don't stay home and cover your head with a pillow. Go outside and plant a tulip bulb in the ground: that is an act or rebirth. Sprinkle breadcrumbs for squirrels or sunflower seeds for the birds: that is a claiming of life. And when you have done that or if you cannot do that, go stare at a tree whose leaves are letting go for its very survival, pick up a leaf, stare at it. It is life. It has something to teach you.

You are as precious as the birds or the tulips or the trees whose crenelated bark protects the insects who seek its shelter. You are an amazing, complex being, with poetry in your arteries and charity layered beneath your skin. You have before you a day full of opportunities for living and giving. Do not think you know all there is to know about yourself, for you have not given enough away yet to be able to claim self-knowledge. Do you have work to do today? Then do it as if your life were hanging in the balance, do it as fiercely as if it mattered, for it does. Do you think the world doesn't need you? Think again!

You cleanse the world with your breathing. You beautify the world with your giving. You perfect the world with your thinking and acting and caring. Don't stay home and suffocate your sorrow. Go outside and give yourself to the world's asking.