You carry within you the capacity to imagine and give shape to your world. It is a pure and blessed way of living. Train yourself to this, but also trust whatever comes. If it comes from your desire, from some inner need, accept that and hate nothing. Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet Worpswede, July [...]
One of the great delights of poetry is that when you’re really functioning, you’re tapping the unconscious in a way that is distinct from the ordinary, the customary, use of the mind in daily life. You’re somehow cracking the shell separating you from the unknown. There’s no formula for accessing the unconscious. Themore you enter [...]
Originally posted in 2007. I went on to admire him even more for his work publicizing the importance of organ donation. The world has lost one of the true greats today. Stanford University commencement, Steve Jobs, June 12, 2005 I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest [...]
Perhaps each of us has a starved place, and each of us knows deep down what we need to fill that place. To find the courage to trust and honor the search, to follow the voice that tells us what we need to do, even when it doesn’t seem to make sense, is a worthy [...]
What is the meaning of life? … a simple question; one that seemed to close in on one with the years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. – Virginia Woolf (read this the first time [...]
True peace comes with the discovery that we can respect the seasons of life with a spacious and undefended heart. In it we learn to trust, to rest in the truth of the way things are, to willingly accept the measure of joy and sorrow we are given. – Jack Kornfield, The Art of Forgiveness, [...]
The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know – and their [...]
Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole – that is the consummation of the endeavor of art. – Stanley Kunitz Reflections, introduction to The [...]
“When you look back on a lifetime and think of what has been given to the world by your presence, your fugitive presence, inevitably you think of your art, whatever it may be, as the gift you have made to the world in acknowledgment of the gift you have been given, which is the life [...]
We have some happy days and some unhappy days, some great loves and barren spaces. We have this life, this instantaneous blossoming. Will I ever learn not to choose among its moments, will I ever learn to walk both its hollow and hilly lands? – Ellen Gilchrist, Starcarbon Email this post
