A couple of quotes from Jack Kornfield on aspects highlighted in Buddhism:

Awareness
"The spirit of awareness or mindfulness really means coming into our life, into the physical senses, into the feelings, into the movement of mind, and into the heart, and living each day from our heart. What do we care about? Taking a concern and a care for the preciousness of the earth. In the end what one discovers is that mindfulness and love are the same thing. To be aware, without grasping or resisting or trying to change—to receive what's here—is to love it; that they're not really separate, that the heart and the mind come together. Or as one of my teachers said: The mind creates the abyss and the heart crosses it. The mind creates distinctions, and coming into the present, into the heart, resolves all of that."

Mindfulness
"The Buddha very often said that mindfulness was the heart or the essence of his practice—to be heedful or aware—that was the road to liberation and to the deathless, to freedom from even birth and death; that is, freedom from being caught in the cyclic nature of things, stepping outside the cycle of things....

To be mindful first means simply to come into the present—to listen with our senses, with our heart, with our physical body, with our ears, with our eyes, to what is actually here in the present; the body, the heart and the mind.

Even mindfulness, however, cannot be grasped. There are days when you're going to be more mindful and days when you're less mindful. And it too, like all things, comes and goes. What you can do is nourish and find ways... Spiritual life is pretty simple. It's not easy but it's pretty simple."