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

If we call the young ones, say 10 to 30 years old, 'siblings,' we can see they tend to be naturally ecological. They regard whales and owls as siblings too. That's a great advance.

Before I was a parent I was struck by Rilke, who, as you know, didn't go to his daughter's wedding because he was writing a poem that day. That was the ideal for artistic behavior in 1950. That's the way I wanted to live.

Rumi is astounding, fertile, abundant, almost more an excitable library of poetry than a person.

An elder is someone who understands that the world belongs to the dead.

The body weeps the tears the eyes never shed.

There's a quality we could call vertical attention, which is an attention upward toward ancestors, spiritual states, angels, gods.