Go with the pain, let it take you. Open your palms and your body to the pain. It comes in waves like the tide and you must be open as a vessel lying on the beach, letting it fill you up and then, retreating, leaving you empty and clear...
One must lose one’s life in order to find it.
Total freedom is never what one imagines and, in fact, hardly exists. It comes as a shock in life to learn that we usually only exchange one set of restrictions for another. The second set, however, is self-chosen, and therefore easier to accept.
My father taught me that a bill is like a crying baby and has to be attended to at once.
We are always bargaining with our feelings so that we can live from day to day.
Rivers perhaps are the only physical features of the world that are at their best from the air.
One can never pay in gratitude; one can only pay ‘in kind’ somewhere else in life.
Why is it that you can sometimes feel the reality of people more keenly through a letter than face to face?
Men kick friendship around like a football, but it doesn’t seem to crack. Women treat it like glass and it goes to pieces.
After all, I don’t see why I am always asking for private, individual, selfish miracles when every year there are miracles like white dogwood.
I want a singleness of eye, a purity of intention, a central core to my life that will enable me to carry out these obligations and activities as well as I can.
Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found.
Forsythia is pure joy. There is not an ounce, not a glimmer of sadness or even knowledge in forsythia. Pure, undiluted, untouched joy.
When the heart is flooded with love there is no room in it for fear, for doubt, for hesitation.
Eternally, woman spills herself away in driblets to the thirsty, seldom being allowed the time, the quiet, the peace, to let the pitcher fill up to the brim.
Only with winter-patience can we bring the deep-desired, long-awaited Spring.
In the sheltered simplicity of the first days after a baby is born, one sees again the magical closed circle, the miraculous sense of two people existing only for each other.
Perhaps I am a bear, or some hibernating animal underneath, for the instinct to be half asleep all winter is so strong in me.
You can’t just write and write and put things in a drawer. They wither without the warm sun of someone else’s appreciation.
The beach is not a place to work; to read, write or to think.