the soul finds its existence through a loss of control to those powers greater than human experience.

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

There are bland, faceless, and exploitative corporations, and there are starving, curmudgeonly or academic poets unwilling to come to terms with the greater realities of existence, but both are the vestigial remains of a world that I for one would be glad to see disappear. The poet needs the practicalities of making a living to test and temper the

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

We might at first label the body’s simple need to focus inward depression. But as we practice going inward, we come to realize that much of it is not depression in the least; it is a cry for something else, often the physical body’s simple need for rest, for contemplation, and for a kind of forgotten courage, one difficult to hear, demanding not a

THE LEADEN EYED Let not young souls be smothered out before They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride. It is the world’s sore crime its babes grow dull, Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden eyed. Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly, Not that they sow, but they seldom reap. Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve Not that

The first step to preserving the soul in our individual lives is to admit that the world has a soul also, and is somehow participating with us in our work and destiny. That there is a sacred otherness to the world that is breathtakingly helpful simply because it is not us; it is not defined by our human worries and preoccupations, and it never will

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

This summoning of internal imagery may seem like the description of miraculous oracular powers, but it is really the simple process of uncovering something our deeper psyche already knows. The deep psyche or soul, left to find its way, will offer up or recognize in the outer world the images germane to its place on the path of life.