The minute you place yourself above, what does that do to others? - Naomi Shihab Nye

I suggest that blood be bigger than what we're born with, that blood keep growing and growing as we live; otherwise how will we become true citizens of the world? For twenty years, working as a visiting writer in dozens of schools in my city and elsewhere. I have carried poems by writers of many cultures into classrooms, feeling the large family of voices linking human experience. We have no borders when we read.

Sometimes while traveling in Mexico or India or any elsewhere, I feel that luminous sense of being invisible as a traveler, having no long, historical ties, simply being a drifting eye…but after awhile, I grow tired of that feeling and want to be somewhere where the trees are my personal friends again.

Today you will say things you can predict and other things you could never imagine this minute. Don't reject them, let them come through when they're ready, don't think you can plan it all out...