The only requisite to entry into the Middle Passage is to have discovered that one does not know who one is, that there are no rescuers, no Mommy or Daddy, and that one's fellow travelers will do well to survive themselves.

As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.

The truth about intimate relationships is that they can never be any better than our relationship with ourselves.

Destiny commands... and imposes a sacred obligation to show up in the face of one's desire for a normal, casual life... there are other forces afoot of which consciousness has only the dimmest of understandings.

Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

In the end, we are only tiny frightened animals, doing our best to survive amid other tiny frightened animals.

The capacity for growth depends on one's ability to internalize and to take personal responsibility. If we forever see our life as a problem caused by others, a problem to be 'solved,' then no change will occur.