"...The function of freedom is to free somebody else“ - Toni Morrison

Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting. A poem may be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into being. Its most precious quality will remain its having run itself and carried away the poet with it. Read it a hundred times: it will forever keep its freshness as a metal keeps its fragrance. It can

Before he died, Rabbi Zusya said: “In the world to come they will not ask me, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ They will ask me, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”

from Parker Palmer's book

[D]o not depend on the hope of results . . . [Y]ou may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the

The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. But the opposite of a profound truth may be another profound truth.

-Neils Bohr (qtd. Palmer 65)

“[V]iolence is what happens when we don’t know what to do with our suffering.”

Parker Palmer

“…[T]ake on big jobs worth doing, jobs like the spread of love, peace, and justice. That means refusing to be seduced by our cultural obsession with being effective as measured by short-term results. . . . [O]ur heroes take on impossible jobs and stay with them for the long haul because they live by a standard that supersedes effectiveness.”

Parker

“I believe a man should live in his own country and I think the deracination of human beings leads to frustration, in one way or another obstructing the light of the soul. I can live only in my own country. I cannot live without having my feet and my hands on it and my ear against it, without feeling the movement of its waters and its shadows,

“I refuse to separate my search for a way of writing from my search for a way of living.” - Scott Russell Sanders