I have hundreds of poems memorized. Mostly by others, but also my own. I use the poems when I lead retreats for management groups on topics like creating teams, or coming up with a more entrepreneurial system, or creating more excitement.
Sometimes you have to make a complete disaster of your life in such an epic way that it will be absolutely clear to you what you've been doing.
We learn, grow and become compassionate and generous as much through exile as homecoming, as much through loss as gain, as much through giving things away as in receiving what we believe to be our due.
To admit regret is to understand that we are fallible - that there are powers beyond us. To admit regret is to lose control not only of a difficult past but of the very story we tell about our present. To admit sincere and abiding regret is one of our greatest but unspoken contemporary sins.
The frail, vulnerable sounds of which we are capable seem to be essential to a later ability to roar like a lion without scaring everyone to death.
When I'm working with German audiences, I will call on my Rilke and Goethe in the original.
Being a good parent will necessarily break our hearts as we watch a child grow and eventually choose their own way, even through many of the same heartbreaks we have traversed.
If you've given away a sense of your own destiny, you need enormous amounts of hierarchy and protection within the structure to make up for what you've given away.
Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness.
Poetry carries the imagery which is large enough for the kind of life we want for ourselves.
There's a fierce practicality and empiricism which the whole imaginative, lyrical aspect of poetry comes from.
Lion sounds that have not grown from the mouse may exude naked power... but cannot convey any wisdom or understanding... The initial steps on the path to courageous speech then are the first tentative steps into the parts of us that cannot speak.
A real conversation always contains an invitation. You are inviting another person to reveal herself or himself to you, to tell you who they are or what they want.
A sure sign of a soul-based workplace is excitement, enthusiasm, real passion; not manufactured passion, but real involvement. And there's very little fear.
The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.
Questions that have no right to go away are those that have to do with the person we are about to become; they are conversations that will happen with or without our conscious participation.
Poetry is often the art of overhearing yourself say things you didn't know you knew. It is a learned skill to force yourself to articulate your life, your present world or your possibilities for the future.
We speak continually of saving time, but time in its richness is most often lost to us when we are busy without relief.
Sincere regret may be a faculty for paying attention to the future, for sensing a new tide where we missed a previous one, for experiencing timelessness with a grandchild where we neglected a boy of our own.
Without the compassionate understanding of the fear and trepidation that lie behind courageous speech, we are bound only to our arrogance.
