Quotes About Awareness

I swear, I'll try harder not to miss as much: the tree, or how your fingers under still sleep-stunned sheets coaxed all my colors back.

I am not obsessing. I am just sitting here perforating this post-it with a push-pin.

Will you tell us the stories that make us uncomfortable, but not complicit?

Annie Dillard once wrote, "How we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour and that one is what we are doing." I think about this a lot when I'm planning my day and what sort of pleasure I might suck out of its marrow during these tumultuous times of constant upheaval and war. Sometimes that means noticing even the most mundane of tasks in order to know we are alive, that we are living.

What is it about noticing beauty that brings you out of yourself and returns you to yourself?

It turns out poetry does, in fact, do the thing I want it to do… it helps me return to the world, to experience it, to pay attention.

It wasn't until later, when I moved in with him and stood outside on our patchy imperfect lawn, that I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

One question that I often get asked is how to overcome writer's block. And the funny thing is, I overcome it, by not overcoming it. I think it's okay to not write. I think it's okay not to talk, not to make, not to create, not to produce, produce, produce. How can we listen to the world if we are always talking to the world?

People love to make big pronouncements about poetry saving us. And I want to believe that, but for now, what I can say is … poetry can make us feel. And right now, maybe that's enough. It doesn't have to bring us hope or joy, it just has to remind us that we feel. That we are alive, and here, and feeling the world.

Just this morning, I saw seven cardinals brash and bold as sin in a leafless tree. I let them be for a long while before I shook the air and screwed it all up just by being alive too.

Mental health needs a great deal of attention. It's the final taboo and it needs to be faced and dealt with.

I am a mystic. I believe in hearing the inaudible and touching the intangible and seeing the invisible.

If you've never stared off in the distance, then your life is a shame.

While the Cold War made instant annihilation a credible threat in the 1950s, by the mid-1960s some were beginning to realize that even the everyday activities of our project of civilization were not, in total, going unnoticed by the planet.

The special virtue of freedom is not that it makes you richer and more powerful but that it gives you more time to understand what it means to be alive.

If knowledge is power, knowing what we don't know is wisdom.

WHAT WE GAIN FROM MINDFULNESS

It seemed as if a glaze had been washed from my senses, brightening the sound of the traffic up ahead on the avenue, separating the bus's pneumatic brakes from the bass chug of the delivery-truck engines and the whir and bump of gliding taxis.

The present had somehow ceased to be an emergency.

But holding Michael had always been like holding a little person, who knew that his feeding would end, who knew that if you were picked up you would be put down, that the comfort came but also went. Without knowing what it was, I'd felt that tension in his little groping arms and fitful legs, the discomfort of the foreknowledge

the motion of our blood could almost stop, our bodies be laid to sleep, but somehow the soul be kept alive. Simply by the things we saw and heard, in any given moment

There was just the sensation of it. A

The movement's other great achievement is this. Among its supporters, it kept alive a tradition, a way of seeing the world, a human capacity for outrage at pain inflicted on another human being, no matter whether that pain is inflicted on someone of another color, in another country, at another end of the earth.

The key to fighting in the dark is no different: you had to perceive your opponent, sense him, and never use your imagination. The darkness inside your head is something your imagination fills with stories that have nothing to do with the real darkness around you.