The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America

A famous Zen master, while weighing flax on a scale, was once asked the meaning of Zen by a student. Without taking his concentrated eyes off the scale, he adjusted the weights and said, “Three pounds of flax.”

Soul has to do with the way a human being belongs to their world, their work, or their human community. Where there is little sense of belonging there is little sense of soul. The soulful qualities of life depend on these qualities of belonging. It seems to me that human beings are always desperate to belong to something larger than themselves. Whe

There is an ancient Chinese story of an old master potter who attempted to develop a new glaze for his porcelain vases. It became the central focus of his life. Every day he tended the flames of his kilns to a white heat, controlling the temperature to an exact degree. Every day he experimented with the chemistry of the glazes he applied, but still

As T. S. Eliot wrote, in a brilliant and painstaking way: I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope, For hope would be hope for the wrong thing: wait without love for love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.

There were hundreds of thousands out in the work world who frequently but secretly despaired of keeping their souls alive in the organizations for which they worked and who desperately needed to reclaim a life they could call their own. A life of our own, from which we can give to others and to our organizations in an unresentful and ultimately gen

The man who cannot simply close his eyes knowing there is image after image far inside him, waiting quietly until night to rise all around him in the dark it’s all finished for him, he’s just like an old man.

we know of no civilization that has lasted longer than a few thousand years. Yet we propose to bury radioactive waste that will still be dangerous up to one hundred thousand years from now. This can only be a product of what psychologists call magical thinking, the belief that somehow we will be exempted from the griefs and losses that have afflict

Those with busy lives, but bereft of the inner images based on the soul’s desires, have empty larders and no fire in the hearth;

The field of human creativity has long been a constant battleground between the upper world we inhabit every day and the deeper untrammeled energies alive in every element of life. Camille Paglia has written brilliantly on this tumultuous relationship between the two worlds, one seen every day, the other half hidden, in her recent book Sexual Perso

our hope at work may be for a quiet corner out of the mainstream rush of a world that refuses any longer to play fair. Knowing we may be left behind in the fiery rush of the company as it lifts off for another continent, the very deadness of an organization may seem like a welcome respite when faced with the swift-moving nature of postmodern busine