Courage is the measure of our heartfelt participation with life, with one another, with a community, a work, a future.  To be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or do anything except to make conscious those things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of those consequences.  To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world, to live up to and into the necessities of relationships that often already exist with things we find we already care deeply about: with a person, a future, a possibility in society, or with an unknown that begs us on and always has begged us on.  To be courageous is to stay close to the way we are made.

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David Whyte, poet/philosopher/teacher