The Illumination: A Journey of Sisters

“The first thing I can remember clearly is writing my way into the secret room.”

“Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God: But only he who sees, takes off his shoes . .”

“Our Ancestors who lay beneath the loam, speak. Speak in vision and dream. Their language cannot be learned, but it is felt. Felt in our bones and in our blood; within our soul. What made them, made us. We are created from the dirt beneath our feet, and we shall return to it. We have done so before, we will do so again. Some patterns were meant to be repeated. Age after age, aeon after aeon, until the end of time itself.”

“I suspect that some of us are naturally attuned, or open, to the joy of what Walt Whitman called ‘original energy’ or what William Blake celebrates when he says ‘Everything that lives is holy,’ or what H.D. means by ‘spiritual realism,’ or what Li-Young Lee means when he says ’… The deepest possible silence is the silence of God. I feel a poem ultimately imparts silence. The way it’s again disillusioning. It disillusions us of our own small presence in order to reveal the presence of this deeper silence — this pregnant, primal, ancient, contemporary, and imminent silence, which is God.”

“But in my belly’s flames / someone is dancing, calling me by many names / that are secret and filled with light and rise / and break, and I see my previous lives.”

[The soul] is and becomes what it remembers.

But I know I live half alive in the world, / Half my life belongs to the wild darkness.

I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.

“Two souls are sometimes created together and in love before they’re even born.”

“Forget about enlightment. Sit down wherever you areAnd listen to the wind singing in your veins.”

“I find everything poetic, and it’s in the corners of my heart which are sometimes mysterious that I catch a glimpse of poetry… I feel a sensation that leads me into a poetic state…”

“The Moon does not fight. It attacks no one. It does not worry. It does not try to crush others. It keeps to its course, but by its very nature, it greatly influences. What other body could pull an entire ocean from shore to shore? The Moon is faithful to its nature and its power is never diminished.”

“Love is the general name of the quality of attachment and it is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even partially refined it is the energy and passion of the soul in its search for Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.”