Great Throughts Treasury

"In order to continually re-imagine ourselves through our work lives, we must have a part of us that belongs to something beyond the status quo. Something over the horizon or, paradoxically, beneath us, in the ground of our life. Something as yet hidden, yet to be brought to light. Something which is governed by other laws than the ones we so assiduously obey every day. Something to do with the laws that govern the way we belong to this stubborn and beautiful world."

"In silence, essence speaks to us of essence itself and asks for a kind of unilateral disarmament, our own essential nature slowly emerging as the defended periphery atomizes and falls apart. As the busy edge dissolves we begin to join the conversation through the portal of a present unknowing, robust vulnerability, revealing in the way we listen, a different ear, a more perceptive eye, an imagination refusing to come too early to a conclusion, and belonging to a different person than the one who first entered the quiet."

"In the course of the years a close friendship will always reveal the shadow in the other as much as ourselves, to remain friends we must know the other and their difficulties and even their sins and encourage the best in them, not through critique but through addressing the better part of them, the leading creative edge of their incarnation, thus subtly discouraging what makes them smaller, less generous, less of themselves."

"It is always hard to believe that the courageous step is so close to us, that it is closer than we ever could imagine, that in fact, we already know what it is, and that the step is simpler, more radical than we had thought: which is why we so often prefer the story to be more elaborate, our identities clouded by fear, the horizon safely in the distance, the essay longer than it needs to be and the answer safely in the realm of impossibility."

"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."

"It is not the thing you fear that you must deal with, it is the mother of the thing you fear. The very thing that has given birth to the nightmare."

"Jane Austen never did marry. Why does that statement call for such reflexive pity? It carries a different meaning if we follow it up: Jane Austen never did marry, and therefore she was given the time and perspective to produce books as well-written as those by anyone who ever lived."

"It's my contention that there is no sincere path a human being can take without breaking his or her heart...so it can be a lovely, merciful thing to think, 'Actually, there is no path I can take without having my heart broken, so why not get on with it and stop wanting these extra-special circumstances which stop me from doing something courageous?'"

"In the longing and possession of romantic love, it is as if the body has been loaned to someone else but has then from some remote place, taken over the senses ? we no longer know ourselves. Longing calls for a beautiful, grounded humiliation; the abasement of what we thought we were and strangely, the giving up of central control while being granted a watchful, scintillating, peripheral discrimination. The static willful central identity is pierced and wounded, violated and orphaned into its own future as if set adrift on a tide."

"Longing has its own secret, future destination, and its own seasonal emergence from within, a ripening from the core, a seed growing in our own bodies; it is as if we are put into relationship with an enormous distance inside us leading back to some unknown origin with its own secret timing indifferent to our wills, and gifted at the same time with an intimate sense of proximity, to a lover, to a future, to a transformation, to a life we want for ourselves, and to the beauty of the sky and the ground that surrounds us."

"Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak."

"Longing is nothing without its dangerous edge that cuts and wounds us while setting us free and beckons us exactly because of the human need to invite the right kind of peril. The foundational instinct that we are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world, that we are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, that we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing, for the right woman or the right man, for a son or a daughter, for the right work or for a gift given against all the odds. In longing we move and are moving from a known but abstracted elsewhere, to a beautiful, about to be reached, someone, something or somewhere we want to call our own."

"Lost: Stand still. The trees ahead and the bushes beside you are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here, and you must treat it as a powerful stranger, must ask permission to know it and be known. The forest breathes. Listen. It answers, I have made this place around you, if you leave it you may come back again, saying Here. No two trees are the same to Raven. No two branches are the same to Wren. If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you, you are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows where you are. You must let it find you."

"Love is the conversation between possible, searing disappointment and a profoundly imagined sense of arrival and fulfillment; how we shape that conversation is the touchstone of our ability to love in the real inhabited world."

"Love may be sanctified and ennobled by its commitment to the unconditional horizon of perfection, but what makes love real in the human world seems to be our moving, struggling conversation with that wanted horizon rather than any possibility of arrival. The hope for, or the declaration of a purely spiritual, unconditional love is more often a coded desire for immunity and safety, an attempt to forgo the trials of vulnerability, powerlessness and the exquisite pain to which we apprentice ourselves in a relationship, a marriage, in raising children, in a work we love and desire."

"Magnificent. The morning rose, in memorable pomp, glorious as ere I had beheld?in front, the sea lay laughing at a distance; near, the solid mountains shone, bright as the clouds, grain-tinctured, drenched in empyrean light; and in the meadows and the lower grounds was all the sweetness of a common dawn?dews, vapors, and the melody of birds, and laborers going forth to till the fields. Ah! need I say, dear Friend! that to the brim. My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows were then made for me; bond unknown to me was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly, a dedicated Spirit. On I walked in thankful blessedness, which yet survives."

"Marriage is where we realize that we have also married a stranger whom we must get to know. Marriage is where we learn self-knowledge; where we realize that parts of our own makeup are stranger even than the stranger we have married and very difficult for another person to live with. Marriage is where we realize how much effort we put into preserving our own sense of space and our own sense of self. Marriage is where we realize how much we want to be right and seen to be right. Marriage is where all of these difficult revelations can consign us to imprisonment or help us become larger, more generous, more amusing, more animated participants in the human drama."

"Longing is the transfiguration of aloneness ? like a comet?s passing tail, glimpsed only for a moment but making us willing to give up our perfect house, our paid for home and our accumulated belongings."

"Maturity beckons also, asking us to be larger, more fluid, more elemental, less cornered, less unilateral, a living conversational intuition between the inherited story, the one we are privileged to inhabit and the one, if we are large enough and broad enough, moveable enough and even, here enough, just, astonishingly, about to occur."

"Maturity calls us to risk ourselves as much as immaturity, but for a bigger picture, a larger horizon; for a powerfully generous outward incarnation of our inward qualities and not for gains that make us smaller, even in the winning."

"Maturity is the ability to live fully and equally in multiple contexts; most especially, the ability, despite our grief and losses, to courageously inhabit the past the present and the future all at once. The wisdom that comes from maturity is recognized through a disciplined refusal to choose between or isolate three powerful dynamics that form human identity: what has happened, what is happening now and what is about to occur."

"Maturity is not a static arrived platform, where life is viewed from a calm, untouched oasis of wisdom, but a living elemental frontier between what has happened, what is happening now and the consequences of that past and present; first imagined and then lived into the waiting future."

"Millennia of worrying under night skies have brought human beings to where the complexities of our contemporary societies have almost reached breaking point. In many ways, our to-do lists have become the postmodern equivalent of the priest's rosary, the lama's sutra or the old prayer book ? keeping a larger, avalanching reality at bay. Above all, the to-do list keeps the evil of not-doing at bay, a list that many of us like to chant and cycle through religiously as we make our way to work through the commute."

"Our relationship to time has become corrupted because we allow ourselves very little experience of the TIMEless. We speak continuously of SAVING time, but time in it richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief. We speak of STEALING time as if it no longer belonged to us We speak of NEEDING time as if it wasn't around us already in every moment. We want to MAKE time for ourselves as if it were in our power to o so. Time is the conversation with absence and visitation, the frontier between ourselves and those we love; the hours become ripe with happening only when we are attentive, patient, and present."

"No matter the self-conceited importance of our labors we are all compost for worlds we cannot yet imagine."

"One of the great difficulties as you rise up through an organization is that your prior competencies are exploded and broken apart by the territory you've been promoted into: the field of human identity."

"Our anger breaks to the surface most often through our feeling there is something profoundly wrong with this powerlessness and vulnerability? Anger in its pure state is the measure of the way we are implicated in the world and made vulnerable through love in all its specifics."

"Our voice, then, is a powerful arbiter of our inner life, our power relationships with others, and a touchstone of faith in the life we wish to lead. In the office we can experience the disciplines of speech, and the inner silence from which good speech appears, as a measure of soul in our lives. Sometimes the voice is cowardly, sometimes courageous, and more often somewhere between the two, but whatever its outward appearance, tempered by the pressures of organizational life it represents the urgencies, desires, or emotional strangulation of a soul longing to be heard in the world."

"One small thing I've learned these years, how to be alone, and at the edge of aloneness how to be found by the world."

"Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the conversation. Pay attention to everything in the world as if it's alive. Realize everything has its own discrete existence outside your story. By doing this, you open to gifts and lessons that the world has to give you."

"Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation."

"Read and admire, but then go back to first principles and ask the question yourself, in your own way. Dare to disagree."

"Reality met on its own terms demands absolute presence, and absolute giving away, an ability to live on equal terms with the fleeting and the eternal, the hardly touchable and the fully possible, a full bodily appearance and disappearance, a rested giving in and giving up; another identity braver, more generous and more here than the one looking hungrily for the easy, unearned answer."

"Our work is to make ourselves visible in the world. This is the soul's individual journey, and the soul would much rather fail at its own life than succeed at someone else's."

"Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves."

"Poetry is a street fighter. It has sharp elbows. It can look after itself. Poetry can't be used for manipulation; it's why you never see good poetry in advertising."

"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."

"Poetry gives us courage and sets us straight with the world. Poems are great companions and friends."

"Preserving the soul means that we come out of hiding at last and bring more of ourselves into the workplace. Especially the parts that do not 'belong' to the company. In a sense, the very part of us that doesn't have the least interest in the organization is our greatest offering to it. It is the part that opens the window of the imagination and allows fresh air into the meeting room. It is the part that can put its foot on the brake when the organization is running itself off a cliff. It's the part that can identify unethical behavior and remind everyone what the real priorities are. It is the part that refuses to shame itself or others in order to make its way through the organization. In short, its identity is not locked into the very fears that stop an organization from having the perspectives and adaptability to save itself."

"Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you."

"Silence is like a cradle holding our endeavors and our will; a silent spaciousness sustains us in our work and at the same time connects us to larger worlds that, in the busyness of our daily struggle to achieve, we have not yet investigated. Silence is the soul's break for freedom."

"Silence is frightening, an intimation of the end, the graveyard of fixed identities. Real silence puts any present understanding to shame; orphans us from certainty; leads us beyond the well-known and accepted reality and confronts us with the unknown and previously unacceptable conversation about to break in upon our lives."

"Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own."

"Some things cannot be spoken or discovered until we have been stuck, incapacitated, or blown off course for a while. Plain sailing is pleasant, but you are not going to explore many unknown realms that way."

"Regret is a short, evocative and achingly beautiful word: an elegy to lost possibilities even in its brief annunciation."

"Realizing its inescapable nature, we can see heartbreak not as the end of the road or the cessation of hope but as the close embrace of the essence of what we have wanted or are about to lose."

"Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn that anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you."

"Speed in work has compensations. Speed gets noticed. Speed is praised by others. Speed is self-important. Speed absolves us. Speed means we don?t really belong to any particular thing or person we are visiting and thus appears to elevate us above the ground of our labors. When it becomes all-consuming, speed is the ultimate defense, the antidote to stopping and really looking. If we really saw what we were doing and who we had become, we feel we might not survive the stopping and the accompanying self-appraisal. So we don?t stop, and the faster we go the harder it becomes to stop. We keep moving on whenever any form of true commitment seems to surface. Speed is also warning, a throbbing, insistent indicator that some cliff edge or other is very near, a sure diagnostic sign that we are living someone else?s life and doing someone else?s work. But speed saves us the pain of all that stopping; speed can be such a balm, a saving grace, a way we tell ourselves in unconscious ways, that we are really not participating."

"Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing."

"Start close in, don?t take the second step or the third, start with the first thing close in, the step you don?t want to take."