being

There is one clear urgency in your life that you must never neglect, and that is _ you must be yourself.

The only thing more important than your to-do list is your to-be list. The only thing more important than your to-be list is to be. ~

Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom and complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

We see the world as we are.

The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and the down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colors, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time, its minutes, days and years. Abstract considerations will be of little help, even if they are intended to bring relief. Poetry is quite different. By its very nature it says: All those theories are untrue. Since poetry deals with the singular, not hte general, it can't - if it is good poetry - look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated, and exciting, and so, it cannot reduce life, with all its pain, horror, suffering, and ecstasy, to a unified tonality of boredom or complaint. By necessity poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.

Man is not to direct or to be directed anymore than a tree or a cloud or a stoneMan is not to rule or be ruled anymore than a faith or a truth or a loveMan is not to doubt or to be doubted anymore than a wave or a seed or a fireThere is no problem in living which life hasn't answered to its own needAnd we cannot direct, rule, or doubt what is beyond our highest ability to understand we can only be humble before it we can only worship ourselves because we are a part of itThe eye in the leaf is watching out of our fingersThe ear in the stone is listening through our voicesThe thought of the wave is thinking in our dreamsThe faith of the seed is building with our deaths

The word 'God' defines a personal relation, not an objective concept. Like the name of the beloved in every love. It does not imply separation and distance. Hearing the beloved name is an immediate awareness, a dimensionless proximity of presence. It is our life wholly transformed into relation.

But when a man draws a lifeless thing into his passionate longing for dialogue, lending it independence and as it were a soul, then there may dawn in him the presentiment of a world-wide dialogue with the world-happening that steps up to him even in his environment, which consists partially of things. Or do you seriously think that the giving and taking of signs halts on the threshold of that business where an honest and open spirit is found?

Dear heart, we embrace the song and the story and all our gifts because the world has such great need, and because the world exceedingly rejoices, and because there is no sadder thing than to leave this world having never really shown up.

The ultimate form of attraction is to be what you want to attract.

Cannot it actually be that in a wildly literal sense, unacceptable to one's reason, he meant disappearing in his art, dissolving in his verse, thus leaving of himself, of his nebulous person, nothing but verse?

I am a haystack in a needle of time.

You always were beautiful, and you always will be beautiful.

Be the tolerance you seek.

We are clay and nothing is real for us except the uncanny womb of Being into which we shall return.

I love, therefore I am.

It's why you need other fingers, other tongues. Only other people can make you feel real.

Just as it is by His goodness that God gives being to beings, so also it is by His goodness that He makes causes to be causes, thus delegating to them a certain participation in His actuality. Or rather, since causality flows from actuality, let us say that He confers the one in conferring the other, so that to the Christian mind the physical world in which we live offers a face which is the reverse of its physicism itself, a face where all that was read on the one side in terms of force, energy and law, is now read, on the other in terms of participations and analogies of the Divine Being. The Christian world takes on the character of a sacred world with a relation to God inscribed in its very being and every law that rules its functioning.