And with listening too, it seems to me, it is not the ear that hears, it is not the physical organ that performs that act of inner receptivity. It is the total person who hears

I cannot escape paradox when I look deep into things, in the crafts as well as in poetry in metaphysics or in physics. In physics, matter is immaterial. The physical world, it turns out, is invisible, inaudible, immeasurable; supersensible and unpredictable. Law exists; and yet freedom is possible. In metaphysics, life and death in the commonplace sense collaborate in rhythms which sustain life. The birth of the new entails the death of the old, change; and yet the old does not literally die, it lives on, transformed.

The creative spirit creates with whatever materials are present. With food, with children, with building blocks, with speech, with thoughts, with pigment, with an umbrella, or a wineglass, or a torch. We are not craftsmen only during studio hours. Any more than a man is wise only in his library. Or devout only in church.

An act of the self, that's what one must make. An act of the self, from me to you. From center to center. We must mean what we say, from our innermost heart to the outermost galaxy. Otherwisewe are lost and dizzy in a maze of reflections. We carry light within us. There is no need merely to reflect.

They have never heard of e. e. cummings, who lived in their city, nor of the New York painters. ... But they know well the life of the subway, the office, the factory, the union hall, the hassle for employment;

I have come to feel that we live in a universe of spirit, which materializes and de-materializes grandly; all things seem to me to live, and all acts to contain meaning deeper than matter- of-fact; and the things we do with deepest love and interest compel us by the spiritual forces which dwell in them.

I, like everyone I know, am instinctively motivated toward symbols of wholeness. What is a simpler, more natural one than the pot fired? Wholeness may be thought of as a kind of inner equilibrium, in which all our capacities have been brought into functioning as an organism.

In pottery, by developing sensitivity in manipulating natural materials by hand, I found a wisdom which had died out of the concepts I learned in the university: abstractions, mineralized and dead; while the minerals themselves were alive with energy and meaning.

Some secret center became vitalized in those hours of silent practice in the arts of transformation.

The experience of centering was one I particularly sought because I thought of myself as dispersed, interested in too many things.

One is supposed to be ... Either a craftsman or an intellectual, by a snobbism which claims either hand or head as the seat of true power.

Well, and what is freedom? First of all, freedom seems to mean the absence of external restraint, the freedom to play. When we are free from external tyrannies, we seek freedom from our inner limitations. We find that in order to play we must be nimble and flexible and imaginative, we must be able to have fun, we must feel enjoyment, and sometimes long imprisonment has made us numb and sluggish. And then we find out that there are, paradoxically, disciplines which create in us capacities which allow us to seek our freedom. We learn how to rid ourselves of our boredom, our stiffness, our repressed anger, our anxiety. We become brighter, more energy flows through us, our limbs rise, our spirit comes alive in our tissues. And our gratitude is immeasurable for all the hours of labor that carry us forward.

he surrealists in France called it le point supreme and found it also at the center: le foyer central. When the sense of life in the individual is in touch with the life-power in the universe, is turning with it, he senses himself as potentially whole

We have to realize that a creative being lives within ourselves, whether we like it or not, and that we must get out of its way, for it will give us no peace until we do. Certain kinds of egotism and ambition as well as certain kinds of ignorance and timidity have to be overcome or they will stand in the way of that creator.