Search for insight

Al-Anon Family Groups - The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage, 1971

Our search should not be so much for a solution to a problem, or a way out of our difficulty, no matter how pressing. The search must be for inspiration, for insight, and one cannot know what he will do with an insight until he gets one. ~ Robert K. Greenleaf  pg. 97

You Only….

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Listen to Mary Oliver read "Wild Geese"

You Only….

Wild Geese
By Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Tell me your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting – over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Listen to Mary Oliver read "Wild Geese"

Powerlessness

Anne Truitt, Daybook - The Journal of an Artist, First Scribner trade paperback edition October 2013.

Perhaps the human lesson is always submission. We have a choice: to rebel or to recognize our powerlessness while maintaining our faith. In my own case, the first choice is denied me. I simply haven't the energy. What rebellion is possible for me emerges as febrile depression. My preoccupation of how events should go has tricked me once more; I must try to open myself to the flow of cause and effect (of which I am such a small part) with a clean, trusting simplicity. Pg. 19

My Work Clears The Way Behind Me

Anne Truitt, Threshold: Language and Vision in the Art of Anne Truitt by Anne M. Wagner, Matthew Marks Gallery, New York, 2013

~ Essay II, 1976
A person stands on the earth, subject to the events of being human. These events demand to be understood and, occasionally, to be withstood. My sculptures withstand, to hold within themselves parts of my experience for my own learning. Thus fixed for my contemplation, my experience is in the service of my understanding as it develops in time. My work clears the way behind me, so to speak, so I can advance in the light of its being, and this is a being which, despite my best efforts, evades my comprehension. In my work, I move from the unknown to the unknown, but with the sustenance of its company, its intimate nature strengthening my intent to hold to that most intimate nerve of myself, out of which the work has arisen, mysteriously.  Pg. 112