You can subscribe at heron@herondance.org.
SHE WAS THE FIRST person I met who made philosophy understandable, and the study of it natural. It was she who led me through the works of Camus and showed me, for the first time, how life and suffering are always teachers, or, as with Camus, life and suffering and joy. Like Rilke, I came to understand that even loneliness has a use and that sadness is positively a wellspring of creativity. Since studying with her, all of life, the sadness as well as the joy, has its magnificence, its meaning, and its use.
Alice Walker, from a speech to the 1972 graduating class of Sarah Lawrence college, talking of a teacher who had made a difference in her life.
REASSURANCE
I must love the questions
themselves
as Rilke said
like locked rooms
full of treasure
to which my blind
and groping key
does not yet fit.
and await the answers
as unsealed
letters
mailed with dubious intent
and written in a very foreign
tongue.
and in the hourly making of myself
no thought of Time
to force, to squeeze
the space
I grow into.
by Alice Walker from her book, Anything We Love Can Be Saved