Many of the poems weave autobiographical elements with fabular or mythic materials.
I'll put it to you this way: I never, ever think about the things that I get involved with on a macro means-to-an-ends scale.
If you look closely at a tree you'll notice it's knots and dead branches, just like our bodies. What we learn is that beauty and imperfection go together wonderfully.
Beauty saves. Beauty heals. Beauty motivates. Beauty unites. Beauty returns us to our origins, and here lies the ultimate act of saving, of healing, of overcoming dualism.
We must work on our souls, enlarging and expanding them. We do so by experiencing all of life-the beauty and the joy as well as the grief and pain. Soul work requires paying attention to life, to the laughter and the sorrow, the enlightening and the frightening, the inspiring and the silly.
The system is not working. That is how a paradigm shift begins: the established way of seeing the world no longer functions.
Facing the darkness, admitting the pain, allowing the pain to be pain, is never easy. This is why courage - big-heartedness - is the most essential virtue on the spiritual journey. But if we fail to let pain be pain - and our entire patriarchal culture refuses to let this happen - then pain will haunt us in nightmarish ways. We will become pain's victims instead of the healers we might become.
I wanted to be a scientist. But I had no math skills.
Fried Oreos. What were we talking about before? That's pregnancy-brain for ya! Ha ha ha ha!
In New York, f*** isn't even a word. It's a comma.
I wanted to cry, but I realized that I was too old for that. I would be a woman soon and I would have to learn how to live with a divided heart.