Kent Nerburn
Kent Nerburn
Kent Michael Nerburnis an American author. He has published 16 books of creative non-fiction and essays, focusing on Native American and American culture and general spirituality. He won a Minnesota Book Award in 1995 for Neither Wolf Nor Dog and again in 2010 for The Wolf At Twilight. His most recent work, The Girl who Sang to the Buffalo, is the final book in this trilogy...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
CountryUnited States of America
mean odds embrace
Forgiveness is an embrace, across all barriers, against all odds, in defiance of all that is mean and petty and vindictive and cruel in this life.
creativity like-love fire
The human being is a surprisingly resilient organism. We are impelled toward health not sickness. Your spirit, as surely as your body, will try to heal....So you should not fear tragedy and suffering. Like love, they make you more a part of the human family. From them can come your greatest creativity. They are the fire that burns you pure.
sadness healing joy
Great joys make us love the world. Great sadnesses make us understand the world.
dream eye our-world
That is why we need to travel. If we don't offer ourself to the unknown, our senses dull. Our world becomes small and we lose our sense of wonder. Our eyes don't lift to the horizon; our ears don't hear the sounds around us. The edge is off our experience, and we pass our days in a routine that is both comfortable and limiting. We wake up one day and find that we have lost our dreams in order to protect our days.
responsibility boys past
In times past there were rituals of passage that conducted a boy into manhood, where other men passed along the wisdom and responsibilities that needed to be shared. But today we have no rituals. We are not conducted into manhood; we simply find ourselves there.
judging tasks path
It is not our task to judge the worthiness of our path; it is our task to walk our path with worthiness.
fathers-day dad fatherhood
It is much easier to become a father than to be one.
feet heaven earth
We humans are destined to live with our feet on the earth and our heads in the heavens, and we can never be at peace because we are pulled both ways.
love giving reason
Love has its own time, its own season, and its own reasons from coming and going. You cannot bribe it or coerce it or reason it into staying. You can only embrace it when it arrives and give it away when it comes to you.
dream greatest-fear horizon
Our brightest dreams and our greatest fears are just over the horizon.
wisdom children eye
There are many ways to seek wisdom. There is travel, there are masters, there is service. There is staring into the eyes of children and elders and lovers and strangers. There is sitting silently in one spot and there is being swept along in life's turbulent current. Life itself will grant you wisdom in ways you may neither understand nor choose. It is up to you to be open to all these sources of wisdom and to embrace them with your whole heart.
past miracle darkness
Forgiveness allows us to live in the sunlight of the present, not the darkness of the past. Forgiveness alone, of all our human actions, opens up the world to the miracle of infinite possibility.
loneliness being-alone becoming-one
Solitude is a condition of peace that stands in direct opposition to loneliness. Loneliness is like sitting in an empty room and being aware of the space around you. It is a condition of separateness. Solitude is becoming one with the space around you. It is a condition of union. loneliness is small, solitude is large. loneliness closes in around you; solitude expands toward the infinite. loneliness has its roots in words, in an internal conversation that nodbody answers; solitude has it's roots in the great silence of eternity.
details-of-life pay pausing
Something precious is lost if we rush headlong into the details of life without pausing for a moment to pay homage to the mystery of life and the gift of another day.