شانا

“When the poem, which is life, carries so much violence, how do you not reenact that violence—or try not to? What choices do you make in your revisions? Those kinds of questions were really important to me and remain so. I think, now, I’m also interested in: how do you carry these histories, realities, and somehow make a life force, some kind of vital energy? Two true things can happen at once, which can be like a glitch between two words that feels like an energy that is not consumed by grief, but informed by it. Sometimes it’s an image. But it’s really about holding onto a kind of fullness of imagination that’s not only shaped by brutality, because that is the condition of it all. There are other responses that I’m trying to cultivate which have to do with what gives you breath or takes you by beautiful surprise or allows some measure of music for a moment.”

Mysticism is awe. And I think any human being who's lost awe is really a lost person. A civilization that's lost awe, an educational system that can't teach awe and nurture it, a worship system that is devoid of awe because it is so full of human verbosity, is perverse. These systems are doing the opposite of what we have to do, which is to awaken the heart. Mysticism is about heart-knowledge, heart-experience.

“You have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.”