Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.

In college, you learn how to learn. Four years is not too much time to spend at that.

Writing a poem ... is a kind of possible love affair between something like the heart (that courageous but also shy factory of emotion) and the learned skills of the conscious mind.

You have to be in the world to understand what the spiritual is about, and you have to be spiritual in order to truly be able to accept what the world is about.

As long as you're dancing, you can break the rules.

Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.

But the owls themselves are not hard to find, silent and on the wing, with their ear tufts flat against their heads as they fly and their huge wings alternately gliding and flapping as they maneuver through the trees. Athena's owl of wisdom and Merlin's companion, Archimedes, were screech owls surely, not this bird with the glassy gaze, restless on the bough, nothing but blood on its mind.