And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Interpretation
Being emotionally open can lead to both joy and pain.
This quote reflects the idea that those who are most receptive to beauty and love, much like appreciating flowers, are also the ones who are vulnerable to suffering and heartache, represented by the thorns. It highlights the dual nature of emotional experiences, suggesting that a tender heart can encounter both great joy and inevitable sorrow.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a heartfelt discussion about love and loss.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
In the English language there are orphans and widows, but there is no word for the parents who loses a child.
I went through the extremes of amazing notoriety and also the dreaded things that you never thought you'd have to live through. Not everything works the way you want it to, but if I sit back and think, 'Am I happy about this?' Yeah. I wouldn't have done anything any better.
Our lives disconnect and reconnect, we move on, and later we may again touch one another, again bounce away. This is the felt shape of a human life, neither simply linear nor wholly disjunctive nor endlessly bifurcating, but rather this bouncey-castle sequence of bumpings-into and tumblings-apart.
For every laugh, there should be a tear.
From the age of 15 to 50, I'd hardly stepped out of a kitchen. I just wanted to live a little, to spend time with my wife and children. The first time I saw snow was when I was 50, because I'd never had the time before.
I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree's way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
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