The distance between the adolescent and the true adult is about five thousand miles, but the distance between the adult and the elder is almost as large.

My feeling is that poetry is also a healing process, and then when a person tries to write poetry with depth or beauty, he will find himself guided along paths which will heal him, and this is more important, actually, than any of the poetry he writes.

The beginning of love is a horror of emptiness.

Male initiation does not move toward machoism; on the contrary, it moves toward achieving a cultivated heart before we die.

The ancestors are very much invested in the children, because the children are the ones who are going to continue the world that the ancestors made.

I think more and more people are recognizing how much adults and elders are actually needed. That's a gift of the sibling society.

The best poems take long journeys. I like poetry best that journeys--while remaining in the human scale--to the other world, which may be a place as easily overlooked as a bee's wing