I feel most alive, most electric with faith, breath, and courage, when I think of God as a current that runs through all that is. Not by will or by choice. Not as a benediction but because there are laws even God must obey.
Interpretation
The quote reflects the idea that faith and courage are intertwined with the divine essence that sustains life, implying a natural order or laws governing existence.
Tracy K. Smith expresses a profound connection to the divine as an inherent current that energizes and uplifts life. She suggests that faith and courage are not merely choices but rather essential elements of experiencing life to its fullest, governed by a set of universal laws that even the divine acknowledges, highlighting a balance between human agency and a larger cosmic order.
In practice
In a motivational speech about overcoming challenges, you can use this quote to emphasize the role of faith and courage.
We all need poetry. The moments in our lives that are characterized by language that has to do with necessity or the market, or just, you know, things that take us away from the big questions that we have, those are the things that I think urge us to think about what a poem can offer.
I wanted to write the kind of poetry that people read and remembered, that they lived by - the kinds of lines that I carried with me from moment to moment on a given day without even having chosen to.
I love the sense of looking at the sad, paltry, and yet very familiar spectacle that we must make from moment to moment in our lives, and in our frenzy, as something that's as out there as alien life.
Losing my father made me want to find out if I could come up with a version of God or the afterlife that I could feel like was acceptable now that both my parents are in it.
Prose is something that is persistent in staying in one place long enough to not only zero in on the dramatic effect of something that might have happened, or something that might have been seen, but also in watching how it played out and thinking about the cause and the effect.
A question is a pursuit, an invitation to envision and explore a series of possibilities, to struggle and empathize and doubt and believe. The question moves, whereas our sense of what an answer is can often be static, a stopping point.
Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion of death.
My business is that of every other good citizen - to uphold the law.
There should be a word for that brief period just after waking when the mind is full of warm pink nothing. You lie there entirely empty of thought, except for a growing suspicion that heading towards you, like a sockful of damp sand in a nocturnal alleyway, are all the recollections you'd really rather do without, and which amount to the fact that the only mitigating factor in your horrible future is the certainty that it will be quite short.
Men decided that it was better to pay taxes than to fight among themselves; better to pay tribute to one magnificent robber than to bribe them all.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.