You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.
How shall I touch you unless it is everywhere?
There is nothing more pathetic than caution when headlong might save a life, even, possibly, your own.
That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?
I learned from Whitman that the poem is a temple – or a green field – a place to enter, and in which to feel.
I cherish two sentences and keep them close to my desk. The first is by Flaubert. I came upon it among Van Gough’s letters. It says, simply, ‘Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation.
What I mean by spirituality is not theology, but attitude.
Or maybe it’s about the wonderful things that may happen if you break the ropes that are holding you.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those who think they have the answers.
All things are meltable, and replaceable. Not at this moment, but soon enough, we are lambs and we are leaves, and we are stars, and the shining, mysterious pond water itself.
For Emerson, the value and distinction of transcendentalism was very much akin to this swerving and rolling away from acute definition. All the world is taken in through the eye, to reach the soul, where it becomes more, representative of a realm deeper than appearances: a realm ideal and sublime, the deep stillness that is, whose whole proclamation is the silence and the lack of material instance in which, patiently and radiantly, the universe exists.
The multiplicity of forms! The hummingbird, the fox, the raven, the sparrow hawk, the otter, the dragonfly, the water lily! And on and on. It must be a great disappointment to God if we are not dazzled at least ten times a day.
But literature, the best of it, does not aim to be literature. It wants and strives, beyond that artifact part of itself, to be a true part of the composite human record – that is, not words but a reality.
Here is an amazement – once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
Today is a day like any other: twenty-four hours, a little sunshine, a little rain. Listen, says ambition, nervously shifting her weight from one boot to another – why don’t you get going? For there I am, in the mossy shadows, under the trees. And to tell the truth I don’t want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don’t want to sell my life for money, I don’t even want to come in out of the rain.
Certainly there is within each of us a self that is neither a child, nor a servant of the hours. It is a third self, occasional in some of us, tyrant in others. This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity. Intellectual.
Be ignited, or be gone.
And what has consciousness come to anyway, so far, that is better than these light-filled bodies?
I’ll just leave you with this. I don’t care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It’s enough to know that for some people, they exist, and that they dance.
There are lots of ways to dance and to spin, sometimes it just starts my feet first then my entire body, I am spinning no one can see it but it is happening. I am so glad to be alive, I am so glad to be loving and loved. Even if I were close to the finish, even if I were at my final breath, I would be here to take a stand, bereft of such astonishments, but for them. If I were a Sufi for sure I would be one of the spinning kind.