Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.

I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.

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.

Poetry's work is the clarification and magnification of being.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.

Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.