To be human is to become visible while carrying what is hidden as a gift to others.
Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation.
You’ll always love the person, if you’re sensible. But you get a lot of people, especially in divorces and separations, doing a lot of damage to themselves, because they can’t figure out that they actually still love this person, but not in their original way.
There is no house like the house of belonging.
The price of our vitality is the sum of all our fears.
We are the only species on earth capable of preventing our own flowering.
When your eyes are tired the world is tired also. When your vision has gone no part of the world can find you. Time to go into the dark where the night has eyes to recognize its own. There you can be sure you are not beyond love.
Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future.
Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
For the personality, bankruptcy or failure may be a disaster. For the soul, it may be grist for its strangely joyful mill, and a condition it has been secretly engineering for years.
To give generously but appropriately and then, most difficult of all, and as the full apotheosis of the art, with feeling, in the moment and spontaneously, has always been recognized as one of the greatest of human qualities.
The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.
Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul’s break for freedom.
When I recite poems onstage, I put myself into the very personal struggle and it grants tremendous perspective. At the same time you get another perspective on the poem you’re reciting.
Everyone casts a shadow. Everyone has a relationship with the fearful unknown.
The tragedy with velocity as the answer to complexity is that, after awhile, you cannot see or comprehend anything that is not traveling at the same speed you are. And you actually start to feel disturbed by people who have a sense of restfulness to their existence.
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.