True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'.

The ordinary activities I find most compatible with contemplation are walking, baking bread, and doing laundry.

To be an American is to move on, as if we could outrun change. To attach oneself to place is to surrender to it, and suffer with it.

One may have been a fool, but there's no foolishness like being bitter.

Poets are immersed in process, and I mean process not as an amorphous blur but as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn't. But it will be necessary to revise--to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things--in order to make it come out right.

When you come to a place where you have to left or right, go straight ahead.

Wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom.