Self-reflection is a desire felt by the body, as well as the soul. As dancers, healers, and saints all know, when you turn your attention toward even the simplest physical process - breath, the small movements of the eyes, the turning of a foot in midair - what might have seemed dull matter suddenly awakens.

Susan Griffin

Categorized in : Self Reflection Eye

A story is told as much by silence as by speech.

Susan Griffin

silence writing inspirational

This earth is my sister; I love her daily grace, her silent daring, and how loved I am. How we admire this strength in each other, all that we have lost, all that we have suffered, all that we know: We are stunned by this beauty, and I do not forget: what she is to me, what I am to her.

Susan Griffin

grace earth forget

Every important social movement reconfigures the world in the imagination. What was obscure comes forward, lies are revealed, memory shaken, new delineations drawn over the old maps: it is from this new way of seeing the present that hope emerges for the future...Let us begin to imagine the worlds we would like to inhabit, the long lives we will share, and the many futures in our hands.

Susan Griffin

memories lying hands

I know I am made from this earth, as my mother's hands were made from this earth, as her dreams came from this earth and all that I know, I know in this earth, the body of the bird, this pen, this paper, these hands, this tongue speaking, all that I know speaks to me through this earth.

Susan Griffin

mother dream hands

We keep secrets from ourselves that all along we know.

Susan Griffin

secret knows

But still, the other voice, the intuitive, returns, like grass forcing its way through concrete.

Susan Griffin

intuition voice way

Philosophy means nothing unless it is connected to birth, death, and the continuance of life. Anytime you are going to build a society that works, you have to begin from nature and the body.

Susan Griffin

body philosophy mean

Just as the slave master required the slaves to imitate the image he had of them, so women, who live in a relatively powerless position, politically and economically, feel obliged by a kind of implicit force to live up to culture's image of what is female.

Susan Griffin

female kind culture

Each time I write, each time the authentic words break through, I am changed. The older order that I was collapses and dies. I lose control. I do not know exactly what words will appear on the page. I follow language. I follow the sound of the words, and I am surprised and transformed by what I record.

Susan Griffin

break-through writing order

we are nature. We are nature seeing nature. We are nature with a concept of nature. Nature weeping. Nature speaking of nature to nature.

Susan Griffin

weeping seeing nature

The mind can forget what the body, defined by each breath, subject to the heart beating, does not.

Susan Griffin

mind doe heart

Poetry is a good medium for revolutionary hope.

Susan Griffin

mediums revolutionary poetry-is

It is a grief over the fate of the Earth that contains within it a joyful hope, that we might reclaim this Earth.

Susan Griffin

fate grief earth

The hope you feel when you are in love is not necessarily for anything in particular. Love brings something inside you to life. Perhaps it is just the full dimensionality of your own capacity to feel that returns. In this state you think no impediment can be large enough to interrupt your passion. The feeling spills beyond the object of your love to color the whole world. The mood is not unlike the mood of revolutionaries in the first blush of victory, at the dawn of hope. Anything seems possible. And in the event of failure, it will be this taste of possibility that makes disillusion bitter.

Susan Griffin

passion hope love-is

I think artists can go to a level of vision that can often save us from a situation which seems to have no solution whatsoever.

Susan Griffin

artist healing thinking

What is buried in the past of one generation falls to the next to claim.

Susan Griffin

generations past fall

To make love is to become like this infant again. We grope with our mouths toward the body of another being, whom we trust, who takes us in her arms. We rock together with this loved one. We move beyond speech. Our bodies move past all the controls we have learned. We cry out in ecstasy, in feeling. We are back in a natural world before culture tried to erase our experience of nature. In this world, to touch another is to express love; there is no idea apart from feeling, and no feeling which does not ring through our bodies and our souls at once.

Susan Griffin

sex past moving

The hard surface of the stone is impervious to nothing in the end. The heat of the sun leaves evidence of daylight. Each drop of rain changes the form; even the wind and the air itself, invisible to our eyes, etches its presence. … All history is taken in by stones.

Susan Griffin

eye taken rain

Even in the grimmest of circumstances, a shift in perspective can create startling change.

Susan Griffin

perspective serious circumstances

Yes we are devilish; that is true we cackle. Yes we are dark like the soil and wild like the animals. And we turn to each other and stare into this darkness. We find it beautiful. We find this darkness irresistible. We cease all hiding.

Susan Griffin

dark animal beautiful