If we spend our life
looking for the eye of the hurricane,
we live a life that is fruitless.

We die without having really lived.
No one can know what life is.
But we can experience life directly.
Only that is given to human beings.
Life is not a safe space.
It never was, and never will be.

Until we see though the game
that doesn’t work,
we won’t play the real game.
Some people never see through it
and die without ever having lived.

—Joko Beck

In the deeps
are the violence and terror
of which psychology has warned us.

But if you ride these monsters
deeper down,
if you drop with them
over the worlds rim,
you find what our sciences
cannot locate or name,
the substrate,
the ocean, or matrix, or ether
which buoys the rest,
which gives goodness its power for good,
and evil its power for evil,
the unified field:
Our complex and inexplicable caring for each other,
and for our life together here.
This is given.

—Anne Dillard

Morning is when I am awake
and there is dawn in me.

Moral reform
is the effort to throw off sleep…..
We must learn to reawaken
and keep ourselves awake,
not by mechanical aids,
but by the infinite expectation of the dawn,
which does not forsake us
in our soundest sleep…
to affect the quality of the day,
that is the highest of the arts.

Every man is tasked to make his life,
even in its details,
worthy of this most
elevated and critical hour.

—H. D. Thoreau