The School of Soft Attention Quotes

“Heart-Mind, left to its natural state, is vast as a panorama of Nature.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“Make the sunrise a temple.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“There’s a form of nourishment that only you can give to yourself and if you don’t learn the language of how that’s done, even on your last day here you will have remained a stranger to yourself and all those with whom you kept company.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“Stop spinning on your busy wheel of pain long enough to hear this: You are not outside the fold of your original preciousness. Even the dawn-bird is heralding this truth each morning, singing to you a map-song with coordinates leading to your renewal.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“My deepest wish for you is that the deepest parts of you can one day put down the battle and let yourself truly be held in a cradle of loving sunlight.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“The festival is over.
We sit quietly
sipping on memories of the day
looking out past window boxes
at revelers heading home.

I turn and watch
as hieroglyphics
flow from your mouth.
Ancient architectures
are being released again
from doorways opening
up and down your spine.

In this hour before sleep, we feel it.
The fibers holding the world together
are crackling again.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“The soul is not a land-locked entity. It can grow feathers.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“When you get too much of the world on you that which is natural in you starts to struggle.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“When you are part of the caravan of crazy clouds you start to become a little less domesticated and a little more like wild mountain weather.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“It matters not if others realize you were really the rain falling on their parched and thirsty fields.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“The old instruction still stands: Be full-of-care what you cast your eyes upon. Ignore that which does not help you or the world to bloom.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“Ponder for a moment that there is, in fact, a world beyond saving; that it is here, now, cascading swiftly toward its predictable end. Alongside it, also here-now, is another world, bright, eternal. Be part of that one.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“The magic of your larger blooming life has been trying to reach you -- pouring through cracks, seeping up through the ground around you. It has no aim, save one: to save you; to bring back the moist oasis of midnight wine and pillow talk to that dry desert you've become.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“And maybe, just maybe, you'll see yourself now through your childhood eyes and you'll stand forgiven and realize...the magic you had then never left you; you just forgot how to listen.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“He asked me, as if looking for one definitive moment in time: 'How did Zen begin?' I pondered the matter a moment. 'Some say it started with a flower held up in the air, but you can't rely on formulas. Zen man Ikkyu was enlightened by the sound of a squawking crow.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“Spring night in winter. The door open to night air. A family walks by. A child laughs with glee. Night-Sit. I ponder an old phrase of Ikkyu's: The buddhadharma is also the Way of Tea. A bolt of lightning splits my brain open and I pour down into my own heart.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“There is a Great Story that binds us all together and it's not the one any of us grew up with.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“There is something bittersweet about letting go; about parting from anyone or anything that holds memory.

But it is Spring. The weather is nice outside tonight. I put my writing utensils away for the rest of the season and take back up the old practices of the Forest-Sitting Religion.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“In these times, when even a simple day can feel like a firing pin, stretching corpse-like upon the earth is not leisure. It is medicine.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“I know the camel driver
constantly hit you with sharp words
when you were young,
but he has moved on,
and now you are the one
with the whip in your hand.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“Who's keeping score? Fade over the horizon, anonymous!”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“When the soul becomes unburdened it's like a new saddle on a fresh horse. Suddenly the trail feels right again, and the strong horizon line in front of you as you turn becomes its own form of soothing medicine.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“Place the Heart-Mind's Trustworthy Light onto the Old Code of Good Travelers: The antidote to depression is devotion.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“If you're tired of spinning: anchor. If you're tired of being pulled into dark waters of suffering: stop biting honey-covered hooks.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention

“There is a way of entering the forest when the breeze of the trees becomes your guide...there is a way of approaching the self without a heavy-hand, when the heart-mind slowly becomes unburdened by the past, where the body listening with the whole of itself finally becomes attuned to all the subtle happenings in the realm not yet stained by the faithless world of man.”
― Frank LaRue Owen, The School of Soft Attention