painting by Zao Wou Ki


"The existence of sensitive people is an advantage for humankind because it is this group that best expresses humanity's creative urges and needs.  Through their instinctual responses the world is best interpreted.  Under normal circumstances, they are artists or artisans, seekers, inventors, shamans, poets, prophets.  There would be valid and powerful evolutionary reasons for the survival of genetic material coding for sensitivity.  It is not diseases that are being inherited but a trait of intrinsic survival value to human beings.  Sensitivity is transmuted into suffering and disorders only when the world is unable to heed the exquisitely tuned physiological and psychic responses of the sensitive individual."   - Gabor Maté


image of painting found at Marlborough New York gallery website
passage by Gabor Maté found in his book Scattered