How we respond to an invitation can mark or maim us for the rest of our days. A life can often be measured against how sure we were in responding to the initial beckoning image.

Good poets, like good rock climbers, look not for clinging but for real purchase. People who are serious about pursuing their vocation look for purchase, not for a map of the future or a guided way up the cliff. They try not to cling too closely to what seems to bar their way, but look for where the present point of contact actually resides. No

This sense of belonging and not belonging is lived out by most people through three principal dynamics: first, through relationship to other people and other living things (particularly and very personally, to one other living, breathing person in relationship or marriage); second, through work; and third, through an understanding of what it means

In my early teens, I had looked around at the strange world of adults and saw with a kind of horror that almost all of them seemed to be preoccupied with the details of life in such a way that they had lost sight of the greater picture. Adults seemed to have forgotten basic elemental and joyful relationships with clouds or horizons or grass that

From the outside, especially to those who long for a more artistic life, a writer looks to be involved in what looks like unscheduled imaginative adventure, but what she needs above all else is structure and a goodly amount of space within that structure. It takes a good, settled sense of what we are about, first to think that we deserve the time

The existentially disappointed gentleman on the other side of the fire had no idea how much his defensive posture reinforced his notions of the world, what he had driven off or what had not even come out of hiding to be driven off in the first place. He did not meet my daughter, because he did not even know she was there. How many other

As in the first marriage, the great questions that touch on personal happiness in work have to do with an ability to hold our own conversation amid the constant background of shouted needs, hectoring advice and received wisdom.

It is remarkable how deathly afraid we are of any real quiet that might start to open up a spacious noncoercive relationship with the self or the world. Much easier to turn on the iPod, the laptop, the BlackBerry. In unmediated silence we intuit all our flaws being made abundantly clear to us and all our previous actions being revealed in their

To neglect any one of the three marriages is to impoverish them all, because they are not actually separate commitments but different expressions of the way each individual belongs to the world.