These paintings were not “about” anything. They were not “representations” of nature. They were not copies of nature. They were, as Thoreau would have said, “the thing itself.” (Emerson exhorted Thoreau to let his work so live and breathe that every sentence would be its own evidence!) Frost said of his poems: “They are an idea of an idea of an

The focus was exhilarating. For the first time in my life, everything was lined up around a clear dharma assignment. And I discovered a secret: Bringing forth what is within you is mostly about creating the right conditions

“Every man has a vocation to be someone: but he must understand clearly that in order to fulfill this vocation he can only be one person: himself.”

Of course I had no idea that this wildness in him would later turn in on itself—as it did on Frost, who was dogged by depression throughout his life.

She was born a Quaker. As such, she found herself in a vastly different social milieu than other American girls—a world with at least a window open to other possibilities. Her family believed in absolute equality of the sexes.

jivan mukta—the soul awake in this lifetime.

And she knew that most likely the vote would not come in her lifetime. “Not in our day,” she wrote, “but we must work on for future generations.”

“It was a necessary laziness. It was the way his mind, his imagination, worked; he needed all that time, the spaciousness, the ease of getting from day to day. Poems could root in those spaces. In his case, they did.”

the capacity to stand in mystery; the capacity to tolerate the unknown; the courage to live in the wilderness for a while; the love of the dark and the night and the moon; the wisdom of the circle, not the line. (How can we not hear echoes here of John Keats’s Negative Capability?)