Isaiah Berlin once stated that "Tolstoy was by nature a fox, but believed in being a hedgehog," referring to the greek poet Archilochus: The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing." (Charles Moore)

The mind is like tofu. By itself it has no taste. Everything depends on the flavour of the marinade it steeps in. (Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi)

May you feel contented and safe
May you feel protected and pleased
May your physical body support you with strength
May your life unfold smoothly with ease
(Sylvia Boorstein)

Deaf Mute in the Pear Tree
P.K. Page

His clumsy body is a golden fruit
pendulous in the pear tree

Blunt fingers among the multitudinous buds

Adriatic blue the sky above and through
the forking twigs

Sun ruddying tree's trunk, his trunk
his massive head thick-knobbed with burnished curls
tight-clenched in bud

(Painting by Generalic. Primitive.)

I watch him prune with silent secateurs

Boots in the crotch of branches shift their weight
heavily as oxen in a stall

Hear small inarticulate mews from his locked mouth
a kitten in a box

Pear clippings fall
soundlessly on the ground
Spring finches sing
soundlessly in the leaves

A stone. A stone in ears and on his tongue

Through palm and fingertip he knows the tree's
quick springtime pulse

Smells in its sap the sweet incipient pears

Pale sunlight's choppy water glistens on
his mutely snipping blades

and flags and scraps of blue
above him make regatta of the day

But when he sees his wife's foreshortened shape
sudden and silent in the grass below
uptilt its face to him

then air is kisses, kisses

stone dissolves

his locked throat finds a little door

and through it feathered joy
flies screaming like a jay

To glimpse our vocation, we must learn how to be sought out and found by a work as much as we strive to identify it ourselves. We must make ourselves findable by being seen; to do that we must hazard ourselves and make ourselves available to the world we want to enter. Finding and being found is like a mutual falling in love. To have a possibility of happiness we must at the beginning fall in love at least a little with our work. We can choose a work on a mere strategic, financial basis, but then we should not expect profound future happiness as a result.

A real work, like a real love, takes not only passion but a certain daily, obsessive, tenacious, illogical form of insanity to keep it alive. Once you have experienced the real essence at the beginning of the affair with a work, the task, as in a marriage, is to keep the work, the company, the initial image with which we fell in love, alive. We want to be surprised again and again by where our work takes us and what kind of person we are becoming as we follow it. Like a love, or a sense of our selves, we can nibble and negotiate at the edges but the central core of the relationship is actually nonnegotiable. A real work cannot be balanced with a marriage in a strategic way, a little bit on that side, a little bit on the other; it can only be put in conversation with that marriage, as an equal partner. All the strategies for making them work together will come from understanding that central conversation. And what is that conversation? What is the thing called the self that drives home from a work and walks through the door into a relationship? Who is it who goes out the door in the morning and leaves a loved, a husband, a wife, a daughter, a home behind and looks to a new future in the day?

David Whyte, The Three Marriage: Reimagining Work, Self and Relationship

Even as a child she had lived her own small life all within herself. At a very early period she had apprehended instinctively the dual life—that outward existence which conforms, the inward life which questions. (Kate Chopin, The Awakening)

There would be no one to live for her during those coming years; she would live for herself. There would be no powerful will bending hers in that blind persistence with which men and women believe they have a right to impose a private will upon a fellow-creature. (Kate Chopin, The Story of an Hour)

She was not going through any acute mental process or reasoning with herself, nor was she striving to explain to her satisfaction the motive of her action. She was not thinking at all. She seemed for the time to be taking a rest from that laborious and fatiguing function and to have abandoned herself to some mechanical impulse that directed her actions and freed her of responsibility. (Kate Chopin, A Pair of Silk Stockings)

.....the realm of ten thousand joys and ten thousand woes....(Buddha)

Your rage is only sorrow trying to break through. (Hal Duncan)

I wish I knew the beauty of leaves falling.
To whom are we beautiful as we go?

(David Ignatow)

In the beginning of heaven and earth
There were no words.
Words came out of the womb of matter
And whether a man dispassionately
Sees to the core of life
Or passionately sees the surface
The core and the surface
Are eventually the same,
Words making them seem different
Only to express appearance.
If name be needed, wonder names them both:
From wonder into wonder
Existence opens.

(Tao Te Ching, trans. Witter Bynner)

To cultivate equanamity, the balance in the mind that sustains both natural wisdom and the natural inclination to love. (Sylvia Boorstein)

It means a mind able, through clarity, to choose a wise response. (Sylvia Boorstein)

Steadfast benevolence, sustained by the wisdom that anything other than benevolence is painful, protects the mind from all afflictions. (Sylvia Boorstein)

How we respond to an invitation can mark or maim us for the rest of our days. A life can often be measured against how sure we are in resonding to the initial beckoning image. (David Whyte)

There seems to be a constant visiting dynamic in all stages of life where it appers that we get only the girl, the guy, the work, the job, the sense of self, or a participation in wider creation that we actually feel we are worthy of. (David Whyte)

In the Buddhist tradition the ability to be happy is often translated into english as "equanamity" roughly meaning to be equal to things, to be large enough for the drama in which we find ourselves. (David Whyte)