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

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

though the world will never be simple, a life that honors the soul seems to have a kind of radical simplicity at the center of it.

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;

if we can see the path ahead laid out for us, there is a good chance it is not our path; it is probably someone else’s we have substituted for our own. Our own path must be deciphered every step of the way.

Simple elements thrown together, even at random, exhibit tremendously complex behavior. Complex behavior can suddenly give rise to simple systems, and the laws of complexity seem to hold at every level, indifferent to the elements that make up the system. A calm manager working with simple paddle strokes can ride a turbulent river of events into ca

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

There are energies and powers in the world that are greater than any human endeavor, even the mighty corporate world that lately we have come to hold in so much esteem. Despite everything our inheritance may tell us, work is not and never has been the very center of the human universe; and the universe, with marvelous compassion, seems willing to t

If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro’ narrow chinks of his cavern. Blake, “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”

There is an old saying in the Zen Buddhist tradition: “Before Zen study, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; during Zen study, mountains are no longer mountains and rivers are no longer rivers; after Zen study, mountains are mountains again and rivers are rivers.” Of course, this all sounds very linear: before, during, and after, with en