How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.

You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will, But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.

When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.

Come o'er the sea, Maiden with me, Mine through the sunshine, storms and snows; Seasons may roll, But the true soul Burns the same, where'er it goes.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print.

And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.

The devil...the prowde spirite...cannot endure to be mocked.