Quotes About Awareness

Astonishing material and revelation appear in our lives all the time. Let it be. Unto us, so much is given. We just have to be open for business.

There were moments when I understood that there was nothing much I was going to understand or figure out. There was simply the present moment, awareness, impermanence, birdsong, love. There is no fixing this setup here. It seems broken and ruined at times, but it isn't: it's simply the nature of human life.

Writing can give you what having a baby can give you: it can get you to start paying attention, can help you to soften, can wake you up.

I am learning slowly to bring my crazy pinball-machine mind back to this place...

I saw a button pin once that said: "I'm not tense. I'm just very, very alert.

You may have gotten into the habit of doubting that voice that was telling you quite clearly what was really going on. It is essential you get that back.

I like to think that Henry James said his classic line, A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, while looking for his glasses, and that they were on top of his head.

What a mess we are, I thought. But this is usually where any hope of improvement begins, acknowledging the mess. When I am well, I know not to mess with mess right away; I try to let silence and time work their magic. [p. 100]

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching. And maybe the stitching is crude, or it is unraveling, but if it were precise, we'd pretend that life was just fine and running like a Swiss watch. This is not helpful if on the inside our understanding is that life is more often a cuckoo clock with rusty gears.

At five that night, I went back to the market and bought three sixteen-ounce Rainier Ales. I bounced back to my house, Mary Lou Retton-like, sipped the first ale, took the Valium, smoked a joint, drank the second ale, took another Valium, listened to "Into the Mystic" ten times, drank the third Ale, too the Valium and the Halcion, and discovered two unhappy thoughts. One was it was only seven o'clock. The second was that I was wide awake.

Are you willing to see what you are seeing, and to know what you know?

Look back on your life and find something small that made a big difference.

Life is not a submarine.

How alive am I willing to be?

If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.

I am going to try to pay attention to the spring. I am going to look around at all the flowers, and look up at the hectic trees. I am going to close my eyes and listen.

Becoming a writer is about becoming conscious.

One rarely knows where to begin the search for meaning, though by necessity, we can only start where we are.

Writers show us the glades we'd missed, the trickling voices of streams, the eyes of a barn owl watching us. A writer like my father revealed a shape and movement amid it all, layers, meaning, perspective, joy, because he paid such careful attention, and paying attention is about the biggest redemption there is.

It was never meant to be permanent. You must have known the tide would come back in.

Jesus is] saying that we could be aware of, filled with, and saved by the presence of holy beauty, rather than worship golden calves.

Life is change and what we need is muscle, flexibility, and awareness.

Every one of us sometimes needs a tour guide to remind us how big and deep life is meant to be.

We live stitch by stitch, when we're lucky. If you fixate on the big picture, the whole shebang, the overview, you miss the stitching.