Great Throughts Treasury

"But when someone enters that valley with you, that mud, it somehow saves you again."

"But where do we even start on the daily walk of restoration and awakening? We start where we are. We find God in our human lives, and that includes the suffering. I get thirsty people glasses of water, even if that thirsty person is just me."

"But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You're not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You're not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You're here to love, and be loved, freely. If you find out next week that you are terminally ill - and we're all terminally ill on this bus - what will matter are memories of beauty, that people loved you, and that you loved them."

"But you can't teach writing, people tell me. And I say, 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions?"

"But you don't always get what you want; you get what you get."

"But you have to remind yourself that perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor."

"But you can?t get to any of these truths by sitting in a field smiling beatifically, avoiding your anger and damage and grief. Your anger and damage and grief are the way to the truth. We don?t have much truth to express unless we have gone into those rooms and closets and woods and abysses that we were told not go in to. When we have gone in and looked around for a long while, just breathing and finally taking it in ? then we will be able to speak in our own voice and to stay in the present moment. And that moment is home."

"Butterflies were wind energy made visible."

"But, honey, that's a naughty word. Both of us have absolutely got to stop using it. Okay?"

"By the great Persian mystical poet Rumi: ?Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure.?"

"By then I'd figured out the gift of failure, which is that it breaks through all that held breath and isometric tension about needing to look good: it's the gift of feeling floppier."

"Can you imagine the hopelessness of trying to live a spiritual life when you?re secretly looking up at the skies not for illumination or direction, but to gauge, miserably, the odds of rain?"

"Children should not have treacherous diseases or be afraid. This should be one rule we all agree on."

"Certainty is missing the point entirely."

"Close your eyes and get quiet for a minute, until the chatter starts up. Then isolate one of the voices and imagine the person speaking as a mouse. Pick it up by the tail and drop it into a mason jar. Then isolate another voice, pick it up by the tail, drop it in the jar. And so on. Drop in any high-maintenance parental units, drop in any contractors, lawyers, colleagues, children, anyone who is whining in your head. Then put the lid on, and watch all these mouse people clawing at the glass, jabbering away, trying to make you feel like shit because you won?t do what they want?won?t give them more money, won?t be more successful, won?t see them more often. Then imagine that there is a volume-control button on the bottle. Turn it all the way up for a minute, and listen to the stream of angry, neglected, guilt-mongering voices. Then turn it all the way down and watch the frantic mice lunge at the glass, trying to get to you. Leave it down, and get back to your shitty first draft. A writer friend of mine suggests opening the jar and shooting them all in the head. But I think he?s a little angry, and I?m sure nothing like this would ever occur to you."

"Clutter and mess show us that life is being lived...Tidiness makes me think of held breath, of suspended animation... Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here."

"Day by day you have to give the work before you all the best stuff you have, not saving up for later projects. If you give freely, there will always be more."

"Courage is fear that has said its prayers."

"Disaster usually happens for me when everything I have counted on has stopped working, including all my best skills, intentions, and good ideas."

"Don?t look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."

"Domestic pain can be searing, and it is usually what does us in. It?s almost indigestible: death, divorce, old age, drugs; brain-damaged children, violence, senility, unfaithfulness. Good luck with figuring it out. It unfolds, and you experience it, and it is so horrible and endless that you could almost give up a dozen times. But grace can be the experience of a second wind, when even though what you want is clarity and resolution, what you get is stamina and poignancy and the strength to hang on. Through the most ordinary things, books, for instance, or a postcard, or eyes or hands, life is transformed. Hands that for decades reached out to hurt us, to drag us down, to control us, or to wave us away in dismissal now reach for us differently. They become instruments of tenderness, buoyancy, exploration, hope."

"Don?t get me wrong: grief sucks, it really does. Unfortunately, though, avoiding it robs us of life, of the now, of a sense of living spirit."

"Does sunset sometimes look like the sun is coming up? Do you know what a faithful love is like? You?re crying; you say you?ve burned yourself. But can you think of anyone who?s not hazy with smoke? ?Rumi"

"Do you think that we're wired this way? With the devil inside? Yeah, in the same way we're wired for God. But not to the same extent."

"Don?t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor."

"Don't be mean to yourself, though? this is the only sin."

"Dreadlocks make people wonder if you?re trying to be rebellious."

"Don't look at your feet to see if you are doing it right. Just dance."

"During Advent, we have to sit in our own anxiety and funkiness long enough to know what a Promised Land would be like, or, to put it another way, what it means to be saved--which, if we are to believe Jesus or Gandhi, specifically means to see everyone on earth as family."

"E.L. Doctorow said once said that 'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard."

"E. L. Doctorow once said that writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. You don?t have to see where you?re going, you don?t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice about writing, or life, I have ever heard."

"Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, martyred plants rising up from their shrouds. Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines."

"Elizabeth talking to Rosie re Sharon leaving--Try to be a good sport, baby. Sharon feels as bad as you do. It's all right for you to be mad, but...try to be as good a sport as you can. I'll tell you. It's a run-of-the-mill shitty thing. Life is full of them. And it is ALWAYS feels better to be kind."

"Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines."

"Even as we improved as teachers and as students, the children continued to have raging impulse-control problems; the very thing that made them spontaneous and immediate could also make them mean...The other teachers and I had dreamed of taking the kids on field trips, to remove them from the grip and tangle of life -- of a day on the beach; of sandy, sacramental hot dogs; of playing in the ocean, making sculptures, and drawing with sticks. But we could barely manage them in class."

"Even if only the people in your writing group read your memoirs or stories or novel, even if you only wrote your story so that one day your children would know what life was like when you were a child and you knew the name of every dog in town ? still, to have written your version is an honorable thing to have done."

"Even mushrooms respond to light?I suppose they blink their mushroomy little eyes, like the rest of us."

"Every single one of us at birth is given an emotional acre all our own."

"Everybody thinks their opinion is the right one. If they didn't, they would get a new one."

"Every Sunday I nudge Sam in her direction, and he walks to where she is sitting and hugs her. She smells him behind the ears, where he most smells like sweet unwashed new potatoes. This is in fact what I think God may smell like, a young child's slightly dirty neck."

"Every sound is by definition a stop, which is how we can hear it."

"Everyone has come to understand that unconditional love is a reality, but with as shelf life of about eight to ten seconds."

"Everyone was on God's payroll, whether they knew it or not."

"Everyone, from almost every tradition, agrees on five things. Rule 1: We are all family. Rule 2: You reap exactly what you sow, that is, you cannot grow tulips from zucchini seeds. Rule 3: Try to breathe every few minutes or so. Rule 4: It helps beyond words to plant bulbs in the dark of winter. Rule 5: It is immoral to hit first."

"Everything was coming together by coming apart . . . It is the most difficult Zen practice to leave people to their destiny, even though it's painful - just loving them, and breathing with them, and distracting them in a sweet way, and laughing with them? if something was not my problem, I probably did not have the solution."

"Expectations are resentments waiting to happen."

"Faith includes noticing the mess, the emptiness and discomfort, and letting it be there until some light returns. Faith also means reaching deeply within, for the sense one was born with, the sense, for example, to go for a walk."

"Expectations are resentments under construction."

"First I showered off that horrible butt smell you get from being on an airplane."

"First find a path, and a little light to see by. Then push up your sleeves and start helping."