Making sense is our second language.

Sensing comes first.

"Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the
street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped
in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.

Be good.

Walk down different streets.

Backwards."

~ Ron Padgett

"Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer."

~ Brad Aaron Modlin

"I will always hold you close,
But I will learn to let you go.
I promise I’ll do better."

Sleeping at Last

"Home is a place where you feel accepted, whether you are Jacob leaving Egypt to be buried in his true home, or a young teen who desires to feel accepted by family and society. I urge everyone to continue to strive for good character and to accept people who may look or act differently. In this way we will all experience home; we will all receive blessings."

~ Eleanor Teweles

"An inner voice always used to be an outer voice. We absorb the tone of others. A harassed or angry parent. The menacing threats of an elder sibling keen to put us down. The words of a schoolyard bully or teacher who seemed impossible to please. We internalize the unhelpful voices, because at certain key moments in the past, they sounded compelling. The authority figures repeated their messages over and over until they got lodge in our own way of thinking." 

~ The School of Life

a game we played

so many times
I finally taught my sons,

not knowing what it was,
until too late, I’d done.

~ Patrick Phillips

This brilliant light is brighter than we’ve known,
Without our darkness to prove it so.
Still, we can’t help but to examine it,
To add our question marks to periods.

~ Sleeping At Last

i’ll run the risk
of being intimate with brokenness.

~ Sleeping At Last

"How’s this poem for its ability to collapse all the years from childhood to middle age in a matter of fifteen short lines?"

Me — a teenager?
If she suddenly stood here now, before me,
would I need to treat her as near and dear,
although she’s strange to me, and distant?
Shed a tear, kiss her forehead
for the simple reason
we share a birthdate?

~ Wisława Szymborska

"That's the paradox: the only time most people feel alive is when they're suffering, when something overwhelms their ordinary, careful armour, and the naked child is flung out onto the world. That's why the things that are worst to undergo are best to remember."

~ Ted Hughes

"We are not at home in the world because we imagine it is as we have become, full of nothing but yearning and forgetting and hoping for something so raw we can't describe it."

~ Simon Van Booy

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

~ David Whyte

"Bad things are going to happen."

"I know this world is far from perfect." ~ Andrea Gibson