At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.

Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.

If truth is the lure, humans are fishes.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.

Every other year or so I go to one of those great generous places, the artist retreats. Some of the poems in The Beauty were written at the MacDowell Colony, in New Hampshire, and others at Civitella Ranieri, in Umbria.