To share a hiding place, physical or psychological, is as intimate as love.

The shadow past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst.

...when we say we're looking for a spiritual adviser, we're really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well as pain.

Any given moment - no matter how casual, how ordinary - is poised, full of gaping life.

I wanted a line in a poem to be the hollow ney of the dervish orchestra whose plaintive wail is a call to God. But all I achieved was awkward shrieking. Not even the pure shriek of a reed in the rain.

The truth doesn't care what we think of it.

History is the gradual instant