Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it,...
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and with that one, is what we are doing.
You can't test courage cautiously, so I ran hard and waved my arms hard, happy.
Van Gogh is utterly dead; the world may be fixed, but it never was broken. And shadow itself may resolve into beauty.
There is something you find interesting, for a reason hard to explain. It is hard to explain because you have never read it on any page; there you begin.
The world is fairly studded and strewn with pennies cast broadside by a generous hand. But- and this is the point- who gets excited by a mere penny? But if you cultivate a healthy poverty and simplici...
The real and proper question is: why is it beautiful?
The higher Christian churches...come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as though they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an approp...
I am a sacrifice bound with cords to the horns of the world's rock altar, waiting for worms. I take a deep breath, I open my eyes. Looking, I see there are worms in the horns of the altar like live ma...
For as long as I could remember, I had been transparent to myself, unselfconscious, learning, doing, most of every day. Now I was in my own way; I myself was a dark object I could not ignore. I couldn...
Why did I have to keep learning this same thing over and over?
This light-shouldered boy could jitterbug, old style, and would; he was more precious than gold, yea, than much fine gold. We jitterbugged...Only the strenth in our fingertips kept us alive. If they w...
The point of going somewhere like the Napo River in Ecuador is not to see the most spectacular anything. It is simply to see what is there.
The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit's one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself like a once-blind man unbound. The gaps are th...
Last year I had a very unusual experience. I was awake, with my eyes closed, when I had a dream. It was a small dream about time. I was dead, I guess, in deep black space high up among many white star...
It's about waking up. A child wakes up over and over again, and notices that she's living. She dreams along, loving the exuberant life
If the sore spot is not fatal, if it does not grow and block something, you can use its power for many years, until the heart resorbs it.
Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.
As soon as beauty is sought not from religion and love, but for pleasure, it degrades the seeker.
The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere.