Let us remember…that in the end we go to poetry for one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives and the world in which we live them, and that if we more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt to destroy both.
Christian Wiman


The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.
W.B Yeats


May my silences become more accurate.
Theodore Roethke
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One does not meet oneself until one catches the reflection from an eye other than human.
Loren Eiseley | from The Ghost Continent, in The Unexpected Universe


If you're moved by something, it doesn't need explaining. 
If you're not, no explanation will move you.
Federico Fellini 


I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.

One relationship among elements in the novel may well be that of conflict, but the reduction of narrative to conflict is absurd. (I have read a how-to-write manual that said, "A story should be seen as a battle," and went on about strategies, attacks, victory, etc.) Conflict, competition, stress, struggle, etc., within the narrative conceived as carrier bag/belly/box/house/medicine bundle, may be seen as necessary elements of a whole which itself cannot be characterised either as conflict or as harmony, since its purpose is neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process.
Ursula la Guin | Still Moving | The Carrier Bag


Because we know their power, we ask of words to hold what we cannot hold — the complexity of experience, the polyphony of voices inside us narrating that experience, the longing for clarity amid the confusion. There is, therefore, singular disorientation to those moments when they fail us — when these prefabricated containers of language turn out too small to contain emotions at once overwhelmingly expansive and acutely specific.
Maria Popova | The Marginalian


Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it. 
Ursula K. Le Guin


Reach out to those you fear.
Touch the heart of complexity.
Imagine beyond what is seen.
Risk vulnerability.
One step at a time. 
John Paul Lederach & Angela Jill Lederach | When Blood and Bones Cry Out: Journeys Through the Soundscape of Healing and Reconciliation  


It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes.
Thomas Merton

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Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honours nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure of affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the word of God. Bust such blasphemy is not possible when the entire Creation is understood as holy and when the works of God are understood as embodying and thus revealing His spirit. 
Wendell Berry


An executive writes a ten-page memo that could be one. An engineer builds an intricate system when a simple one would perform better at half the cost. The consultant mesmerizes clients with frameworks that conceal rather than reveal. We attach prestige to what mystifies us. Complexity intoxicates both the creator and audience, drugging us with the illusion of wisdom. Mastery isn't making the simple complex—it's finding the elegant simplicity that cuts through the complexity.
Shane Parrish


This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and igno­rance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machin­ery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another-from forest to city, from story to computer-at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.
Edouard Glissant


Sometimes hope is a radical act, sometimes a quietly merciful response, sometimes a second wind, or just an increased awareness of goodness and beauty. Breathe it in.
Anne Lammott​


Fundamental questions about the human condition are not beside the point in dire political times; they are the point. How can we think straight amidst cynicism and mendacity? What is there left to love, to cherish, to fight for? How can we act to best secure it? What fences and bridges do we need to build to protect freedom and which walls do we need to destroy?
Lyndsey Stonebridge | We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience


The most paradoxical thing about creative work is that it is both a way in and a way out, that it plunges you into the depths of your being and at the same time takes you out of yourself. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolising my experience and clarifying my own mind in such a way that I am no longer captive to it. All creative work is at bottom a means of self-liberation and a coping mechanism — for the loneliness, the despair, the chaos and contradiction within. It is the best means we have of transmuting that which gnaws at us into something that nourishes, and yet how little of that private ferment is visible in the finished work.
Maria Popova


One is to ask and refrain from asking; to struggle and to refrain from struggle; to think deeply and to refrain from over-thinking in order simply to be present without fretting – in one’s body and one’s soul, at one's desk and chair, in one's factory or studio, feeding the birds that come to the table, walking beside the surf, sitting patiently beneath the apple tree knowing the fruit is ripening as it should.
Melissa Green


Don’t be so careful. Don’t be so calculating about where you place your feet. Don’t be so logical. The beckoning horizons do not dip into a merciless abyss, from which nothing can be salvaged. You will not fall if you reach the abominable edges – where the ground stops abruptly; you will fly. Yes. There’s much more room than our fondest ideologies and contrived evidences could possibly apprehend. So, dance with the sensuous decadence that comes with knowing that you are larger than your containing spaces, that your most outrageous obsessions and drunken fantasies are just as inconsequential as the most popular fads and the most accurate heavens. And in the heat of your glorious performance, toss away those interrupting preoccupations with outcomes, with how you appear in the eyes of public scrutiny, or with how well you are doing – for you are not a crease in the fabric of things, you are the fabric of things…exploring the intense and forlorn beauty of a crease. Life is a dance, and dancing wasn’t invented for destinations.
Báyò Akómoláfé


It's much easier to destroy than to build. What I try to convey is not the mirror of the world. The space where my work exists, it's a universe of its own to me. It's only in art that we can create new worlds. Our body is, in many ways, who we are. We are not our thoughts. We are much more our body, so this awareness makes you, actually, a better human. You will become less a destroyer, and more a builder.
Ohad Naharin | Choreographer, Israel | Transcribed from Move, dance series on Netflix


In the beginner's mind, there are unlimited possibilities. In the expert's mind, there are few.
Shunryu Suzuki Roshi


Having a free mind in Arendt’s sense means turning away from dogma, political certainties, theoretical comfort zones, and satisfying ideologies. It means learning instead to cultivate the art of staying true to the hazards, vulnerabilities, mysteries, and perplexities of reality, because ultimately that is our best chance of remaining human.
Lyndsey Stonebridge | We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience
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What if we only wanted openings, the immortality of the unfinished, the uncut thread, the incomplete, the open door, and the open sea?
Rebecca Solnit | The Faraway Nearby


Ought we not, from time to time, open ourselves up to cosmic sadness? Give your sorrow all the space and shelter in yourself that is its due, for if everyone bears his grief honestly and courageously, the sorrow that now fills the world will abate.
Etty Hillesum


He followed where life led, in profound and excellent contradiction, until it led him back again, changed, to the solitude of the hermitage.
Roger Lipsey | Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton, pg 18


The great way isn’t difficult
      for those who are unattached to their
      preferences.
Let go of longing and aversion,
      and everything will be perfectly clear.
When you cling to a hairbreadth of distinction,
      heaven and earth are set apart.
If you want to realize the truth,
      don't be for or against.
 
—Seng-Ts’an
Roger Lipsey | Angelic Mistakes: The Art of Thomas Merton, pg 157


But what if the other person was just “us” in another form? What if we viewed the person who made a mistake not as “other”, but as an aspect of ourselves, how would we respond? Sure, there might be insurance forms to fill out or dents to fix, but righteousness separates… and we all end up on both sides of this dynamic—as the one who made a mistake and the one who was impacted by that mistake. We cannot choose only one position. So as we go about our day and we find ourselves on one side or the other of a car dent or an emotional dent or a mistake, may we tend to the situation with a sense of shared humanity, instead of righteousness. After all, maybe everyone we meet is just us in another form. And how we relate to them is how we relate to ourselves.
Author unknown


There is really only one way to restore a world that is dying and in disrepair: to make beauty where ugliness has set in. By beauty, I don’t mean a superficial attractiveness, though the word is commonly used in this way. Beauty is a loveliness admired in its entirety, not just at face value. The beauty I’m referring to is metabolized grief. It includes brokenness and fallibility, and in so doing, conveys for us something deliciously real. Like kintsukoroi, the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with powdered gold, what is normally seen as a fatal flaw is distinguished with value. When we come into contact with this kind of beauty, it serves as a medicine for the brokenness in ourselves, which then gives us the courage to live in greater intimacy with the world’s wounds.
Toko-pa Turner


Music creates a resonance system for the soul to communicate through. This is the original human language. Music can cut through all social, political, economic, ethnic and cultural differences. We can create beauty all together in this space. Art, in its many forms, transcends the limitations of spoken word and language.

Art is perhaps the only thing humanity has created that has done no harm.
Zach Bush | Instagram 22 Feb 2023


If you feel safe in the area that you’re working in, you’re not working in the right area. Always go a little further into the water than you feel you’re capable of being in. Go a little bit out of your depth, and if you don’t feel that your feet are quite touching the bottom, you’re just about in the right place to do something exciting.
David Bowie


Never play to the gallery… Always remember that the reason that you initially started working is that there was something inside yourself you felt that if you could manifest in some way, you would understand more about yourself and how you coexist with the rest of society. I think it’s dangerous for an artist to fulfill other people’s expectations—they generally produce their worst work when they do that.
David Bowie


In all imaginative writing, sympathy for the subject is necessary not because it is the politically correct or morally decent posture to adopt but because an absence of sympathy shuts down the mind: engagement fails, the flow of association dries up, and the work narrows. What I mean by sympathy is simply that level of empathic understanding that endows the subject with dimension. The empathy that allows us, the readers, to see the ‘other’ as the other might see himself or herself is the empathy that provides movement in the writing.
 
When someone writes a Mommie Dearest memoir—where the narrator is presented as an innocent and the subject as a monster—the work fails because the situation remains static. For the drama to deepen, we must see the loneliness of the monster and the cunning of the innocent. Above all, it is the narrator who must complicate in order that the subject be given life. 
Vivian Gornick | The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative


The way upward and the way downward are the same.
Heraclitus


Modulation causes the narrator’s position to alter. That process of alteration is at once the conduit for the story being told and, in some important way, the story itself. We are in the presence, in each instance, of a mind puzzling its way out of its own shadows—moving from unearned certainty to thoughtful reconsideration to clarified self-knowledge/ The act of clarifying on the page is an intimate part of the metaphor.
Vivian Gornick | The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative


Inevitably the piece builds only when the narrator is involved not in confession but in this kind of self-investigation, the kind that means to provide motion, purpose, and dramatic tension. Here, it is self-implication that is required. To see one’s own part in the situation—that is, one’s own frightened, cowardly or self-deceived part—is to create the dynamic.
Vivian Gornick | The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative

 
The one we can trust will take us on a journey, make the piece arrive, bring us out into a clearing where the sense of things is larger than it was before.
Vivian Gornick | The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative


And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
T S Eliot | The Dry Salvages


The best thing for being sad…is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
T. H. White | The Once and Future King (Wizard Merlin instructing the young king Arthur)


Whatever I know how to do, I’ve already done. Therefore I must always do what I do not know how to do.
Eduardo Chillida


For it is only habit and memory that dulls the physical passion. Without memory, each night is the first night, each morning the first morning, each kiss and touch are the first.
Alan Lightman | Einstein’s Dreams


Creativity is no escape. Engagement with genuine creativity spurns the urge to retreat or escape from
life. Rather, life is brought full focus into the feeling realm and away from the head. For me, a prerequisite to the engagement is that I take all revisions of myself—shattered, stuck or simply curious—to the altar of my work table. I bring them to the space of unknowing and watch in awe as they disappear entirely.
Miriam Louisa Simons
 

Everybody has a song which is not song at all; it is a process of singing, and when you sing, you are where you are. All I know about method is that when I am not working. I sometimes think I know something, but when I am working, it is quite clear that I know nothing.
John Cage


Our intention is to affirm this life, not to bring order out of chaos, nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord.
John Cage


There is nothing stronger than a broken woman who has rebuilt herself.
Hannah Gadsby


We live in a pale globe, haloed in the light of an underwater moon. Like the blood of a medusa, we are diaphanous; woven of silken threads, spun from microbial skeins, soft as smoke. The skin of our world glows overhead, a membrane holding in fluid and song. We have words; not so out loud, just to look at. We press them into shapes or memories and release them. The word called blue can be sky or long afternoons. Brown can be sand pebbles or an empty heart. Like birds, blue and brown can soar and glide. They can spin like star motes or flatten, like feathers in a storm. 
 
We dance. The space between us is sacred. The space around us is eternity.
Susan T Landry


Look at everything. Don’t close your eyes to the world around you. Look and become curious and interested in what there is to see.
John Cage


Anything that one wants to do really and one loves doing, one must do every day. It should be as easy to the artist and as natural as flying is to a bird. And you can’t imagine a bird saying, “Well, I’m tired today. I’m not going to fly.”
Yehudi Menuhin


There are two principal parts of each personality: the conscious mind and the unconscious, and these are split and dispersed, in most of us, in countless ways and directions. The function of music, like that of any other healthy occupation, is to help to bring those separate parts back together again. Music does this by providing a moment when, awareness of time and space being lost, the multiplicity of elements which make up an individual become integrated and he is one.
John Cage


It was a moral and spiritual teaching: Use your head. Set up your structure as carefully as you can, then surrender to the experience. Accept all of it willingly and gratefully. Be present for whatever comes. Open the heart to chance and change.
John Cage, speaking of his experience with the I Ching


Thoreau got up each morning and walked to the woods as though he had never been where he was going to, so that whatever was there came to him like liquid into an empty glass.
John Cage


Dear Tam and Dan,

What makes our particular job so exceptional that it requires inspiration or a muse to do it? We are artists and we labour in the service of others. It is not something we do only if and when we feel motivated – we create because it is our responsibility to do so. In this respect our occupation is no different than that of most people. Does an ordinary adult go to work only if they feel in the mood? Do doctors? Do labourers? Do teachers? Do taxi drivers? We are duty-bound to do our job, like everyone else, because the space we occupy depends upon our participation and breaks down if we don’t. A committed artist cannot afford the luxury of revelation. Inspiration is the indolent indulgence of the dabbler. Muses, Tam, are for losers!

The idea that you can’t paint because the world is ‘made of war and cruelty’ has to be the lamest and most faint-hearted excuse not to work I have ever heard, Dan. How will painting a fucking picture help? — it will help because art is the noble and necessary rejoinder to the sins of the world. When the world rushes toward us with all its streaming wounds – wanting, needing – do we cover our eyes and shrink away, do we sit and wring our hands in despair, do we run and hide, or do we hasten toward it, like we hasten toward an injured child, with our arms outstretched?

If we are to call ourselves artists then we must avoid the myriad excuses that present themselves and do our job. Yes, the world is sick, and yes it can be cruel, but it would be a whole lot sicker and a whole lot crueler if it were not for painters and filmmakers and songwriters – the beauty-makers – wading through the blood and muck of things, whilst reaching skyward to draw down the very heavens themselves.

These are perilous and urgent times. This is not the hour to sit around moaning about the condition of the world — leave that to the posturing inhabitants of that most morbidly neurotic of spaces, social media — and nor is it the moment to fruitlessly wait for inspiration to find us. It’s time to get to work, to reach up and tear the divine idea from its heavenly cradle and proffer it to the world. Create, Tam! Create, Dan! Create like your life depends on it, because, of course, of course, it does!
Nick Cave | The Red Letter Files


Some of the most difficult work we will do in our lives is to retrieve joy from the clutches of bitterness.
Laura Weaver [1968 - 2024] | River of Awe 


I write poetry because life is both wondrous and poignant, and I feel compelled to celebrate what amazes me and to decry what wounds the world.
Tim Scibles | from his poem, Ant
 

Poetry is one of the places to feel grateful for… to explore and be with the feelings around loss (of environment/the state of our earth). Stanza = room (Italian). Poetry is a room I can go to, to write about these things, to be with them…
Ellen Bass


When we write we are trying to discover something we didn’t know when we started… we are trying to write poems that do work in the world.
Ellen Bass


Most of all I hope my work is about a thing that seems to me of the deepest possible importance in our present-day historical moment: finding ways to recognise and love difference. The attempt to see through eyes that are not your own. To understand that your way of looking at the world is not the only one. To think what it might mean to love those that are not like you. To rejoice in the complexity of things.
Helen Macdonald | Vesper Flights


​Whoever flees pain will love no more. To love is always to feel the opening, to hold the wound always open.
Novalis


If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
Aleksandr Solzhenitsy


The world is teeming; anything can happen.
John Cage | Silence: Lectures and Writings


In times of political crisis, we seem to forget that societies are made of selves, are made at all — that they are collaborative acts of the imagination, works of the creative spirit emanating from the collective conscience of this relational constellation of individuals. As such, they require of us a deep and imaginative sensitivity to other selves, to what it is like to be someone else — that hallmark of our humanity we call empathy.
Maria Popova

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We learn the rope of life by untying its knots.
Jean Toomer


In one and the same fire, clay grows hard and wax melts.
Francis Bacon

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