Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
See, even if you’re stuck in life, if you can describe just exactly the way you’re stuck, then you will immediately recognise that you can’t go on that way anymore. So, just saying precisely, writing precisely how you’re stuck, or how you’re alienated, opens up a door of freedom for you.
All of our great traditions, religious, contemplative and artistic, say that you must a learn how to be alone – and have a relationship with silence. It is difficult, but it can start with just the tiniest quiet moment.
To remember the other world in this world is to live in your true inheritance.
Poetry for me has been a long pilgrimage, a journey and a growing relationship with the unknown.
The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
Inside everyone is a great shout of joy waiting to be born.
I returned to poetry as a more precise way to describe the world, more precise than science.
Genius is becoming something you were all along.
The greatest tragedy is to live out someone else’s life thinking it was your own.
Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone.
The severest test of work today, is not of our strategies, but of our imaginations and identities.
To forge an untouchable, invulnerable identity is actually a sign of retreat from this world; of weakness, a sign of fear rather than strength, and betrays a strange misunderstandin g of an abiding, foundational and necessary reality: that untouched, we disappear.
You must learn one thing. The world was made to be free in. Give up all the other worlds Except the one in which you belong.
The art form has to do with the mystery and the hidden invitation that’s in the room. And that’s when the magic happens, that’s when the deep silence emerges to the surprise of all the attentively listening ears. In a way, you’re following that silence. You go where the silence is deepest.
Shedding the carapace we have been building so assiduously on the surface, we must by definition give up exactly what we thought was necessary to protect us from further harm.
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
The truth about our own modest contribution might immobilize us: much easier then, to tell ourselves a story about how much we make our own reality.
To seek out beauty in our work is to make a pilgrimage of our labors, to understand that the consummation of work lies not only in what we have done, but who we have become while accomplishing the task.
Shyness means you are in the hallway of a greater presence. You just don’t know how to take the conversation another step. It’s a lovely indication.