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Work
Poetry is the ash.
“The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.”
— David W. Orr — Ecological Literacy
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Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is the ash.
~Leonard Cohen
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Every man should dance, for life. Not being a dancer, but dancing.
— Rudolf Nureyev
Unless work is creative work you love, it’s drudgery, it’s slavery by another name. The fact that soulless work is common in our time doesn’t give it dignity. It’s how our culture turns us into obedient sheep. Only the fortunate few find passionate, meaningful work because we don’t know how to encourage our children to find it.
Our system of education pins us to the wall of dutiful effort like struggling butterflies, turning us back into squirming caterpillars.
After schooling, marriage and children keep us in line before we know what hit us…