If you think you can stand to know what you’re made of, try kneeling before God.

My life is an open book; at least this photo album'.~R. Alan Woods [2013].

You are not the oil, you are not the air—merely the point of combustion, the flash-point where the light is born. You are merely the lens in the beam. You can only receive, give, and possess the light as the lens does. If you seek yourself, you rob the lens of its transparency. You will know life and be acknowledged by it according to your degree of transparency—your capacity, that is, to vanish as an end and remain purely as a means.

Your transparency is just another one of your disguises, isn't it? You doubt your value. Don't run from who you are.

The early dew-falls that did a pristine coating,over the woods with its finest transparency,glazed as like its wet white-glassy earrings that hung on the ears of wild flowers—unlatched my fancy.

You have to be transparent so you no longer cast a shadow but instead let the light pass through you.

Courage is being the only only one who knows how terrified you are.

We had better share our bewilderments. By hiding them from each other we should not hide them from ourselves.

Why do the powerful always insist on having a “back story” to justify whatever they do? Why can’t they—just once—do something for the simple reason that it is the right thing to do, in itself, for reasons understood and accepted by all? In politics, laws are passed to secretly serve hidden agendas, for without such agendas many lawmakers would never find the motivation to support anything at all.

Authenticity is hard to fake.