The snow
began here
this morning and all day
continued, its white
rhetoric everywhere
calling us back to why, how,
whence such beauty and what
such an oracular fever!

~ Mary Oliver

Broadcaster, meditator, and author Dan Harris engaged mind scientist and renowned sceptic Sam Harris about his new exploration of spirituality recently released book, Waking Up.

"When I close a book / I open life...I learned about life / from life itself"

~ Pablo Neruda

"So much of what we live goes on inside–"

"One of the first, knockout exercises that you can do with actors, which is used in lots of theater schools where they use masks, is putting a plain, blank, white mask on someone.The moment you take someone’s face away in that way, it’s the most electrifying impression: suddenly to find oneself knowing that that thing one lives with, and which knows is transmitting something all the time, is no longer there."

~ Peter Brook

Oh, I have made myself a tribe
out of my true affections,
and my tribe is scattered!

~ Stanley Kunitz

"If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real."

~ Anne Curzan

Picturing stories is making reductions. Through reductions, we create meaning. 

These reductions are the world as we see it – they are what we see when we read, and they are what we see when we read the world. 

~ Peter Mendelsund

You are a traveler,
you know the open, hostile smiles
of those stuck in their lives.
Make a fire.

~ Stephen Dunn

Sooner or later, I thought, 
the wind would begin to make sense 
if I listened hard 
and took notes religiously.

~ Don Thompson

"The reason that we have the impression that the world is a violent place is that that's what news is about. News is about stuff that happens, not about stuff that doesn't happen, and all the parts of the world that are free of war, that are free of terrorist attacks just don't get reported to us and so we forget about them. We're getting better and better at reporting the violent events that do occur. Something blows up, you can be sure you'll hear about it, but we don't appreciate how much of the world at any given time is at peace."

~ Steven Pinker

"Mindfulness is more like the large hadron collider in that it’s a real tool for making some fundamental discoveries about the nature of the mind." 

~ Sam Harris

"What is this addiction? We have destabilized much of the world with our addiction. We’ve created a drug economy in Afghanistan, in Thailand, in Bolivia and we’ve caused turmoil in Guatemala and now we have elevated thugs in Mexico to the status of billionaires with our despair. And yet, we are an optimistic people."

~ Richard Rodriguez

"Dad has had a series of loses that you just don't get over. He lost Mom. He lost his sight. He can't walk. His hearing is going. He's afraid his mind is almost gone...I was so happy Dad had something wonderful this morning."

~ Stephen Tobolowsky

There’s a place in my brain
where hate won’t grow.

~ Naomi Shihab Nye

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