"Throughout my reading life, poems have greeted me with what feels like urgent compassion. When I’m lost or afraid, the speakers of poems assure me that my feelings are nothing to hide from or deny. Indeed, that vulnerability, uncertainty, and even desperation are not only signs of life, but tools for moving forward toward courage, hope, and purpose. When I’m confident in my convictions, poems alert me to complexities I failed or been unwilling to regard. And like the best of friends, somehow the poems I’ve loved for years managed to keep evolving, meeting me where I am and then — how do they do it? — leading me still further along toward what will startle, console, and even change me. I shouldn’t be surprised, our very selves from day to day are the result of where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, how we’ve hurt and healed, and what we are on the threshold, even now, of discovering. We never cease in our becoming. Neither does this art form, this confidante, this tool designed to remind us how it feels and why it matters to love, to remember, to ache, to fear, to be astonished by what our minds can make and what our spirits can withstand."
"If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
playwright Lillian Hellman
"Listening means an awareness, an openness to learning something new about another person... listening with the intent to learn is an approach to a different type of conversation."
“Inches from my bed and from each other stood the terrarium and a clock. While life in the terrarium flourished, time ticked away its seconds. But the relationship between time and the snail confused me. The snail would make its way through the terrarium while the hands of the clock hardly moved - so I often thought the snail traveled faster than time. Then, absorbed in snail watching, I'd find that time had flown by, unnoticed...
The mountain of things I felt I needed to do reached the moon, yet there was little I could do about anything, and time continued to drag me along its path. We are all hostages of time. We each have the same number of minutes and hours to live within a day, yet to me it didn't feel equally doled out. My illness brought me such an abundance of time that time was nearly all I had. My friends had so little time that I often wished I could give them what time I could not use. It was perplexing how in losing health I had gained something so coveted but to so little purpose...
As the snail's world grew more familiar, my own human world became less so; my species was so large, so rushed, and so confusing...”
Elisabeth Tova Bailey, The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating
"Walls had never defined me, like I had once thought. It was what I brought, from my heart, hands, and soul, to the space within that defined me."
"We cannot be held responsible for what we did not know. But we are deeply accountable for what we do know - knowledge entails responsibility. And this is where I've found the greatest difficulty in forgiving myself. It's easy to review my life and understand that given what I knew at the time, given the examples set all around me, my choices were the best I could make. For these moments, forgiveness for my younger, more foolish self is easy. But as with all soulful work, I have found that the line between knowing and not knowing looks sharp and crisp only from a distance. Up close, there is a blurring that occurs as we near that line, a knowing that is not yet a knowing but more a prickling in the soul that says something is wrong. The first inklings of awareness come with a sense of discomfort, unease, a protest that dies unspoken on your lips. Seek these pricklings, hunt for them, coax them out of hiding and ask, 'What is wrong?' Do not fear them, honor them. These uneasy pricklings... are the soul's guardians and warn us when we have gone astray. When we turn away from a willingness to be aware of these warnings, then we are guilty with cause - we knew, but we chose to act as if we did not. In the end, our personal philosophy is also our best protection against cruelty. When we know what we believe and who we are, we stand strong and sure about what we will and will not allow. For those in our caretaking, such soulful coherence offers them a powerful shield against cruelties large and small.
"Never fear shadows. They simply mean there is a light shining somewhere nearby."
Ruth Renkel
"...living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how... We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark."
"If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because my liberations is bound up in yours, then let us work together."
"...Let’s say I am so charmed by the radiance
of my own anarchy, I invite myself in
for tea, and when I’m not looking, I sneak
the steam from the kettle into my pocket
so the next time I’m missing the coast of Maine
I can gift myself the fog.
Let’s say I’m not just running my mouth
around an old cliché that says we gotta love ourselves.
We don’t. I know I could
keep getting down on myself
until I’m tucked in my grave, looking up at my name
carved in stone, wondering why I never knew
I’d been cast for the lead in my own life.
When it comes to love the only thing I’m certain of is:
you are the best thing
that has ever happened to you..."
Andrea Gibson, from Boomerang Valentine
“But seeking is a kind of work. I don’t mean heading off on wild road trips just to see the stars that are shining above your own roof. I mean committing to a lifetime of engagement: to noticing the world around you, to actively looking for small distillations of beauty, to making time to contemplate and reflect. To learning the names of the plants and places that surround you, or training your mind in the rich pathways of the metaphorical. To finding a way to express your interconnectedness with the rest of humanity. To putting your feet on the ground, every now and then, and feeling the tingle of life that the earth offers in return. It’s all there, waiting for our attention. Take off your shoes, because you are always on holy ground.”
“I am beginning to understand that healing is not about returning to what was, but about accepting the change and adapting to the brokenness. This is happening all around us, for people, for the land. People have done damage to the earth and to each other that can’t be undone. We can lament what was, but that won’t help us take care of what we still have. In fact, it might just hold us back. Nature herself keeps giving and never giving up. Can we be like the trees that keep growing to seal over barbed wire, like the Diné who hung on to their ceremonies and traditions and are reviving their Navajo-Churro flocks, like the injured ram who will learn to see danger coming with one excellent eye?”
Helen Whybrow, The Salt Stones: Seasons of a Shepherd's Life
"...to be calmed by our precious, perfect, impermanence..."
"In a time of destruction, create something. A poem. A parade. A community. A school. A vow. A moral principle. One peaceful moment."
“How do we practice GRACE?
Gather attention: …a reminder for us to pause and give ourselves time to get grounded… to interrupt our self-talk about our assumptions and expectations and to get grounded and truly present.
Recall intention: …recalling our commitment to act with integrity and respect the integrity of those whom we encounter… our motivation keeps us on track, morally grounded, and connected to our highest values.
Attune to self and other: …the process of attunement first to our own physical, emotional, and cognitive experience and then to the experience of others… to reframe the situation in a nonjudgemental and insightful way.
Consider what will serve: This is the process of discernment that is based on conventional understanding and also is supported with our own intuition and insight… What is the wise and compassionate path here? What is an appropriate response?
Engage and end: …ethically engage and act, if appropriate… look for common ground that is consistent with our values and supportive of mutual integrity… mark the end of our time in this compassionate interaction, so that we can move cleanly to the next moment, person, or task.”
Roshi Joan Halifax, Ph.D., Standing at theEdge: finding Freedom Where Fear and Courage Meet
“I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other in that deep way that AI can never replace, because when you read a work of literature you encounter another human being's struggles and successes in describing the world or their heart or a particular time and place in words, and that contact, even through the medium of black ink on white paper, even across continents and centuries, is human and humane…
…Books, I once wrote in one of mine, are solitudes in which we meet, in which the reader in his deepest solitude meet the writer in her deepest solitude; they encourage the empathic imagination that arises from entering into lives other than our own, from expanding beyond the bounds of the self; they encourage the concentration and attention that makes us thoughtful in the most literal sense…”
“I was doing multiple experiments with my colleagues and students around this at the same time I was diagnosed with cancer. And it dawned on me that I needed to learn from my experiments, but I also had to take my personal experience and fold it into what I was studying. So I just started directing my students and my studies toward understanding how energy and information and our learning is passed on in trees as well, and found out that, yeah, they do this—when a tree is dying, it passes on most of its carbon through its networks to the neighboring trees, even different species—and this was so important to the vitality of the new forest. The trees were also receiving messages that increased their defense against the beetle and other disturbance agents in the forest and increased the health of those next generations. I measured and analyzed and saw how the forest gives forward, passes forward. I took that to my children and said, “This is what I need to do too. I’m like the Mother Tree, and even if I’m going to die, I need to give it my all, just like these trees are giving their all.”
“It is a curious emotion, this certain homesickness I have in mind… It is no simple longing for the home town or country of our birth. The emotion is Janus-faced: we are torn between a nostalgia for the familiar and an urge for the foreign and strange. As often as not, we are homesick most for the places we have never known.”
Carson McCullers
“Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”
Emily Dickinson
“We seldom know with certainty what is or is not possible. And that is based on the past."
“If anyone should ask me what I consider the right plans for romantic love - (no one ever asks me such questions but I spend much time making up answers) - I would say that they are based on three acknowledgements:
Never consider it permanent. Consider only its permanent needs.
Never expect it to equal your expectations.
Never regard it as related to qualities, only to emanations.
I can think of any number of fatalities not to commit if you want to be wonderfully in love:
[Anderson lists a total of 33 fatalities. I’ve chosen only a few, for brevity - for the others you’ll have to read her book]
- Never assume that the other person feels as romantic as you do.
- Don’t expect happiness - only rapture.
- Romantic love is loss of identity. Behave with appropriate logic.
- Don’t relate love to morals - chemistry is beyond morality.
- Don’t fill the situation with your vibrations, you leave no room for the other person’s.
- Don’t suffer out loud - even from behind closed doors it will repel.
- Avoid sending the unsolicited photograph.
- Don’t complain about anything - just leave the room, or the city, until you can act like an attractive stranger.
- Always act as if it were Friday afternoon or Christmas Eve.
- Try to arrange to live in meetings and partings forever. …
Of course you never learn all these laws until you’ve lived a hundred years or so and have no further use for them. But if I am vain of my attitude toward love it is because, of those thirty-three suggestions, there are at least twenty-four which I have always obeyed instinctively, even before I knew what all the conflict was about. Therefore when I fell in love in the incurable romantic tradition I thought I would be more intelligent about it than anyone else. I was mistaken.”
Margaret Anderson, from The Fiery Fountains
“Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones—inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones—rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.”
Mary Oliver, from Upstream: Selected Essays
"One must know what one wants to be."
"That inner knowing is the work of a lifetime, for our confusions are ample and our missteps constant amid a world that is constantly telling us who we are and who we ought to be..."
“I have learned to know that the thing we call misunderstanding- that blind bumping of one vessel against the other as they grope for nearness, is the greatest tragedy of humanity. Of all animate life. This cosmic blindness that prevents even the very near from being clearly seen. That is when it hurts most. One feels the futility of life when even those closest to one cannot be clearly seen.”
Zora Neale Hurston - Letter to Carl Van Vechten, December 10, 1944
"...the guest, who does not know good coffee when it is set before him deserves to be cast into outer darkness and fed for evermore upon brimstone and treacle. Better far throw pearls before swine, than pour good coffee into the cups of the indifferent.."
Written in 1896 by Elizabeth Pennell
"There is the world-old controversy that crops up again whenever women attempt to enter a new field. Is a woman fit for this or that work? It would seem that a woman’s success in any particular line would prove her fitness for that work, without regard to theories to the contrary."
Ruth Law, Let Women Fly, Air Travel magazine, February 1918.
"I do not want to get to the end of my life & find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well."
"I think there's so much rightful anxiety about the way that massive global events are playing out, but every day I get up and go to work and do the day-to-day grind of moving that needle forward. That might seem not as glamorous, but it’s the steady drumbeat of marching forward…one foot in front of the next.
I know from what I see on the ground that change is possible."
“Woman is not a fixed reality but a becoming.”
