Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with another, with a community, a work, a future. To be courageous, is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.
What you can plan is too small for you to live. What you can live wholeheartedly will make plans enough for the vitality hidden in your sleep.
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
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.
It might be liberating to think of human life as informed by losses and disappearances as much as by gifted appearances, allowing a more present participation and witness to the difficulty of living.
Being young and trying to catch a glimpse of the depths, of the true self, of the soul, or whatever human beings have called it over the centuries, we often find ourselves surrounded by bossy, hectoring voices trying to short-circuit our personal experience by super-imposing their own disappointments. Much of this bossiness masquerades as an education.
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.
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.
Poetry is the art of overhearing ourselves say things from which it is impossible to retreat.
A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion; not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear.
Absent the edge, we drown in numbness.
Poetry is a break for freedom.
Anything that does not bring you alive is too small for you.
Desire demands only a constant attention to the unknown gravitational field which surrounds us and from which we can recharge ourselves every moment, as if breathing from the atmosphere of possibility itself. A life’s work is not a series of stepping-stones onto which we calmly place our feet, but more like an ocean crossing where there is no path, only a heading, a direction, which, of itself, is in conversation with the elements.
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.
The outlaw is the radical, the one close to the roots of existence. The one who refuses to forget their humanity and, in remembering, helps everyone else remember, too.
Art is the act of triggering deep memories, of what it means to be fully human.
Vulnerability is not a weakness but a faculty for understanding.
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.
What you plan is too small for you to live.