And the heart that is soonest awake to the flowers is always the first to be touch'd by the thorns.
Interpretation
Being emotionally open can lead to both joy and pain.
This quote reflects the idea that those who are most receptive to beauty and love, much like appreciating flowers, are also the ones who are vulnerable to suffering and heartache, represented by the thorns. It highlights the dual nature of emotional experiences, suggesting that a tender heart can encounter both great joy and inevitable sorrow.
In practice
This quote can be shared during a heartfelt discussion about love and loss.
When we relate to our bodies as having soul, we attend to their beauty, their poetry and their expressiveness. Our very habit of treating the body as a machine, whose muscles are like pulleys and its organs engines, forces its poetry underground, so that we experience the body as an instrument and see its poetics only in illness.
Humility, that low, sweet root, from which all heavenly virtues shoot.
How many times do we lose an occasion for soul work by leaping ahead to final solutions without pausing to savor the undertones? We are a radically bottom-line society, eager to act and to end tension, and thus we lose opportunities to know ourselves for our motives and our secrets.
Romantic love is an illusion. Most of us discover this truth at the end of a love affair or else when the sweet emotions of love lead us into marriage and then turn down their flames.
Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves.
Earth has no sorrow that heaven cannot heal.
We need to feel that life is important; we need that fantasy so we can live a little better.
Every black man in Chicago walks through the world differently, and I think what young black boys do is observe, and that's what gives them their road map.
That was the worst part about having cancer, sometimes: The physical evidence of disease separates you from other people.
But it's just because the chances are all against you, just because there is so little hope, that life is sweet over here.
The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.
Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
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