Emphasis Mine, 2
And if only we arrange our life in accordance with the principle which tells us that we must always trust in the difficult, then what now appears to us as the most alien will become our most intimate and trusted experience … Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants our love.
— Letters to a Young Poet, Rainer Maria Rilke
Bonfire at Midnight
A shout comes out of my room
where I’ve been cooped up.
After all my lust and dead living
I can still live with you.
You want me to.
You fix and bring me food.
You forget the way I’ve been.
The ocean moves and surges in the heat
of the middle of the day,
in the heat of this thought I’m having.
Why aren’t all human resistances
burning up with this thought?
It is a drum and arms waving.
It is a bonfire at midnight on the top edge of a hill,
this meeting again with you.
—Rumi
Oath, Defended
I am I is the essence of self-acceptance. But it is not passive or selective self-acceptance. It is active, loud, strong, and, if necessary, heroically aggressive. It applies to all aspects of self …
Judgment value, moral equivocation, cultural and conventional values, the ideas of others do not cause me to deaden, repress or attempt to cut off parts of myself. I includes all that the culture may see as assets, liabilities, limitations, resources, insensitivities, cruelties, neurotic, good, bad, sensitive, wise or stupid in me.
— Compassion and Self Hate, Theodore Isaac Rubin