“We must not overlook the fact that each of us is born with story, and that each of us has a responsibility to pass that on. To fortify our children and grandchildren and help them cope with an increasingly material and technological world, we have to tell them the stories which reinforce their identity, engender their self worth, build their self esteem, and empower them with knowledge.

At the moment we are training our young people without story and story is the repository of knowledge and wisdom throughout Oceania. To us, story is memory, story is the collective consciousness. Without it our young people are having a much harder struggle finding themselves, finding a place to stand, and becoming the whole person they want to be, and we wish to see them become.”

~Merata Mita

They say that I am a poet.
I wonder what they would say if they saw me from the inside.
I bottle emotions and place them into the sea for others to unbottle on distant shores
I am unsure as to whether I ever get my point across.
Or my Love.

—Saul Williams ( Said The Shotgun To The Head)

(Source: audentes-fortuna-juvat, via kenobi-wan-obi)

Certainly most people feel separate from everything that surrounds them. On the one hand there is myself, and on the other hand the rest of the universe. I am not rooted in earth like a tree. I rattle around independently. I seem to be the center of everything, and yet cut off and alone. I can feel what is going on inside my own body, but can only guess what is going on in others. My conscious mind must have its roots and origins in the most unfathomable depths of the being, yet it feels as if it lived all by itself in this tight little skull.

Nevertheless, the physical reality is that my body exists only in relation to this universe, and in fact I am as a attached to it and dependent on it as a leaf on a tree. I feel cut off only because I am split within myself, because I try to be divided from my own feelings and sensations. What I feel and sense therefore seems foreign to me. And on being aware of the unreality of this division, the universe does not seem foreign any more…

Poets voice that which has no voice in this world. They speak in tongues, and hope their words reach the ears and touch the hearts of those who know what it means to live. Much like fiction writers, poets struggle to remember how to make sense of existence. They share a passion for language, and a common, driving need: to imagine the world not just as it is, but how it ought to be.

Poetry tends toward silence. It accounts for the void in a way that fiction is not always able to do. Poetry aspires to be a song, more than a story, to be lyrically rich. It is also full of primal messages that, somehow, can express the inexpressible. There is more than meets the eye. Fiction writers can directly benefit from reading poetry in this way; lines inspire sentences, stanzas transform paragraphs, as poems animate pages.

The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.

—

(via normanbuckley)