The Heart Aroused
Published:
- “The refusal to go down into the lake is the the refusal to be eaten by life. The delusion is that there might be a possibility of immunity from the natural failures that accompany the soul’s explorations of the world. But the story says you are going to be swallowed by something greater one way or another. The question is whether you will give yourself to that greater life consciously.”
- “Winning does not tempt that man / This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively / by constantly greater beings.” — Rilke
- “Always this energy smoulders inside / when it remains unlit / the body fills with dense smoke.” - David Whyte, Out on the Ocean
- “The toxic components of the smoke are resentment, blame, complaint, self-justification, and martyrdom.”
- A bad poem belongs only to the writer, a well-made poem to a circle who share a sensibility to the author, but a great poem pulls in everyone who reads it for generations to come
- “What separates poetry from religious dogma is the ability of a poem to speak across time to everyone no matter their world view.”
- “I want to be with those who know secret things / or else alone.” — Rilke
- Werner Heisenberg, on his deathbed, declared that he had two questions for God: “Why relativity and why turbulence?” He mused that “I really think He may have an answer to the first question.”
- Turbulence is cooked
- “Ten years ago… / I turned my face for a moment / and it became my life.” — Lady manager at AT&T
- “nature…by self-entanglement, produces beauty.” — Otto Rossler
- At the beginning of Dante’s inferno, Dante attempts to climb the mountain to heaven straight away, but is met with a lion (disowned courage, pride, aggression), a wolf (greed), and a leopard (restless lust). Without confronting these parts of himself through the inferno, he cannot rise toward heaven. “We may thank God that it is when we admit our powerlessness that the guide appears” (Helen Luke)