Lent and Ramadan both start this week : invitations to reflect.

Each person is born with an unencumbered spot, free of expectation and regret, free of ambition and embarrassment, free of fear and worry. 

To know this spot of inwardness is to know who we are, not by surface markers of identity, not by where we work or what we wear or how we like to be addressed, but by feeling our place in relation to the Infinite and by inhabiting it. 

This is a hard lifelong task, for the nature of becoming is a constant filming over of where we begin, while the nature of being is a constant erosion of what is not essential. Each of us lives in the midst of this ongoing tension, growing tarnished or covered over, only to be worn back to that incorruptible spot of grace at our core.

Mark Nepo, Unlearning Back to God