Quotes about Vulnerability

Living on earth has always been a dangerous way to spend your time.

Look, if you don't have a bad attitude and lots of things wrong with you, no serious person is going to be interested. If you feel scared, outraged, confused most of the time, come on over. Have a seat.

Jesus said that whatever you did to the least of his people, you did to him, and the lifers in penitentiaries are the leastest people in this country. Just look to see whose budgets are being cut these days -- the old, the crazies, the children in Head Start -- and that's where Jesus will be.

I felt that in my strange new friends and in certain new books, I was meeting my other half. Some people wanted to get rich or famous, but my friends and I wanted to get real. We wanted to get deep. (Also, I suppose, we wanted to get laid.) I devoured books like a person taking vitamins, afraid that otherwise I would remain this gelatinous narcissist, with no possibility of ever becoming thoughtful, of ever being taken seriously.

What I resist is not the truth but when people put a pretty bow on scary things instead of saying, "This is a nightmare. I hate everything. I'm going to go hide in the garage

Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while messes are the artist's true friend. What people somehow (inadvertently, I'm sure) forgot to mention when we were children was that we need to make messes in order to find out who we are and why we are here—and, by extension, what we're supposed to be writing.

This is a hard planet, and we're a vulnerable species. And all I can do is pray: Help. When

I did the only thing I know to do. I said it. I told the truth...90% of the time this is the solution. Tell it. Cry if you can. If you can't, sit in a dejected posture hunched over and stay with this a while. It will shift and become less acute.

This menagerie - it was part of my being repented - to show up places where I might have been afraid, like the zoo or a marriage.

My parents, teachers, and the culture I grew up in showed me a drawer in which to stuff my merciful nature, because mercy made me look vulnerable and foolish, and it made me less productive. It was distracting to focus worried eyes on others instead of on homework, and on poor Dad, after all he had done for us, and on the prize of making the whole family look good.

So I practice the fifth Get: I get in touch with others. I tell my partner the truth about how crunchy I feel inside, how unevolved or vindictive. Or I pick up the three-hundred-pound phone and tell a close friend. Or I get in the car and head to where one of my precious communities has gathered. This might be a park, my church, my Sunday school room; with hikers, sober people, townsfolk.

How come you can hear a chord, and then another chord, and then your heart breaks open?