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On Aug 12, 2013 Dan Duncan wrote on What Do I Really Need Right Now?, by Sharon Salzberg:
Needs are quantifiable, answerable, where wants are an abyss.
Thus Mick Jagger, "...your debutante knows what you need, but I know what you want."
Do I really want to face that abyss? The abyss between you and me even larger than the abyss in my mind....
On Jun 7, 2013 Dan Duncan wrote on We Move in Infinite Space, by Rainer Maria Rilke:
Rilke occupies a special place in my life's journey.
When I was 19 and struggling to write poetry, I read his Letters To A Young Poet, and there was a question that he asked Kappus that brought me up short. I remember that Rilke's answer was something like this:
"You ask me whether you are a poet and I cannot tell you. But I will say this: You need to sit down with yourself and ask yourself very seriously if poetry is the most important activity in your life. Based on how you answer that question, you will be able to say whether or not you are a poet."
I closed the book, and after a long silence, from somewhere deep inside, my answer came.
"No, Poetry is not the most important thing in my life: LIVING is the most important thing!"
From that moment, I began to practice a life of poetry as exploration and not as a disguise.
On Aug 20, 2011 Dan Duncan wrote on You Are Not a Prisoner, by Andrew Cohen:
On Jun 2, 2011 Dan Duncan wrote on A 9-Year-Old's Hidden Self, by Jacob Needleman:
Why is it so hard to remember the taste of not knowing as a child? If I'm lucky, a child's question may strike a chord of real communication such as you describe between Lobsang and Eve.
Is it enough to NOT prepare an answer to that innocence?
The faces of small children in supermarket shopping carts strike me with their seeming wonderment about all that surounds them. They do not ask, they simply wonder, and occasionally I tune in to that wonder and am nourished by it.
On Jul 16, 2015 Dan Duncan wrote on Effects of Adversity, by Eranda Jayawickreme:
When it is really adversity and not just inconvenience, I get through it one breath at a time.
And I remind myself of G.K. Chesterton's aphorism:
"Inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered, and adventure is inconvenience, rightly considered."
In today's economic downturn, my life is full of adventures, one breath at a time.