To begin to understand the gorgeous fever that is consciousness, we must try to understand the senses and what they can tell us about the ravishing world we have the privilege to inhabit.

We live on the leash of our senses. There is no way in which to understand the world without first detecting it through the radar-net of our senses.

There is a furnace in our cells, and when we breathe we pass the world through our bodies, brew it lightly, and turn it loose again, gently altered for having known us.

Above all, we ask the poet to teach us a way of seeing.

Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? ...We are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.

The visual image is a kind of tripwire for the emotions.

We can't enchant the world, which makes its own magic; but we can enchant ourselves by paying deep attention