I know where the half-dead hug their last secrets: the fungi-focus, inertia's children; how they stay there-- limp as drenched insects-- so happy with themselves. 

~ 

You're a living example that the mystics were right: we must escape the ego. 

~ 

In spite of all the paraphernalia for keeping things together, how haphazard  life is, and the judgements of time. 

~ 

The spiritual growth's an oscillatory thing: we move by shivers in the world's tumultuous spine. 

~ 

I have begun, again, my long training as an enemy of contemporary custom. 

~ 

Alas, he's degenerated into a civilized man. 

~ 

He hasn't got time in his life for a dog or a cat. All he's got room for is improvement. 

~ 

To be less than you are is so easy: even a child needs no lesson in this. 

~ 

Civilization is over rated: but there isn't anything much else. 

~ 

To each his own labyrinth. 

~ 

Self-knowledge: the supreme, perhaps the only, good? 

~ 

I'm here, where time stares. 

~ 

I can't fly, except into the wind. 

~ 

I'd live among the fish if I could. 

~ 

I live in a half-night, outside a dream, yet not within life. My dreams don't understand me. 

~ 

Both inner and outer reality the same: the final secret... 

~  

May your feet imitate heaven. 

~ 

Dust shall be, shall see. 

~ 

I believe, even in sleep. 

--from 'The Right to Say Maybe'; Theodore Roethke (assembled by David Wagoner)