Quotes from Roger Housden

Some of us have the good fortune of some type of natural gift, whether it's playing tennis or painting or writing.

When you die, God and the Angels will hold you accountable for all the pleasures you were allowed in life that you denied yourself.

But it happens, and I am thankful enough for that, for those fleeting, wakeful moments of beauty and truth. They are the real joy of being human, brief matches that flare in the dark.

When the heart opens, we forget ourselves and the world pours in: this world, and also the invisible world of meaning that sustains everything that was and ever shall be.

That is what happens when the heart door opens- you become less yourself than part of everything.' Many are the sentinels who guard that door: our fears, our self-importance, our meanness, our greed, our bitterness, and others.

The willingness to let go of what we know you might even call an expression of faith. Faith: not that things will work out as we hope, but faith, simply, in life and its extraordinary intelligence that never fails to surprise. While belief holds on tightly, faith lets go.

Love, like everything else, exists in a spectrum. Love of another, love of the world, love of God, all these loves are really one love in different degrees of light and density.

His priorities for a rich and contented life were friendship, freedom, the pleasures of an examined life, and enough food and shelter to keep body and soul together.

Layton once said that "a poet is deeply conflicted and it is in his work that he reconciles those deep conflicts. It doesn't set the world in order, it doesn't really change anything. It is just a kind of harbor, it's the place of reconciliation, the kiss of peace.

Faith, not belief, carries us forward; for a belief is a thought, whereas faith is a knowing, a certainty which grows in the marrow.

The heart, like the grape, is prone to delivering its harvest in the same moment that it appears to be crushed.

The greatest gift and expression of love is the gesture of open arms - let come what comes - not because you don't care, or because you hope to steel yourself against pain, but because you care so much that you are helpless to do anything else.

But the fullness of life escapes us either way, whether we are holding on or pushing away, I realize now, at this late hour. For at the heart of love is openness. An unfettered openness of heart and spirit, it seems to me, is what intimacy—with another and with all life—really means. That openness is what I now believe true detachment to be.

Orgasmic realizations will always be frowned upon by those who feel they have to keep up appearances.

Give up all the other worlds except the one to which you belong. Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet confinement of your aloneness to learn anything or anyone that does not bring you alive is too small for you.

To say goodbye with all our heart is to turn a parting into a blessing.

We have to say goodbye to everything eventually, and life is punctuated with a thousand goodbyes, some greater, some smaller, all along the way.

great poetry reaches down into the depths of our humanity and captures the very essence of our experience.

Can we stand to gaze into the heart of our loss, the preciousness of what we are losing, and not look away?

have also learned that a goodbye is an opportunity for kindness, for forgiveness, for intimacy, and ultimately for love and a deepening acceptance of life as it is instead of what it was or what we may have wanted it to be.

Goodbye is derived from the phrase "God be with you." A blessing is the offering of one heart to another; to another person, to a situation, to life itself. Isn't that what we are here for? To bless the savor of this precious moment even as it slips through our fingers? To allow its sorrow, its joy, its silence or laughter to enter our life stream and add a measure to who we are? This is the spirit of these ten poems, and the hope of this book.

What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Of course! the path to heaven doesn't lie down in flat miles. It's in the imagination with which you perceive this world, and the gestures with which you honor it.

A sensibility like this makes us prone to wonder, to pondering questions rather than wanting comforting answers. It makes us prone to beauty, to experiences of being lifted beyond our usual sense of who we are into a larger, more inclusive life, which leads to love.