Time & Perspective Quote by Judith Wright

Wright is doing something sly here: she frames spirituality not as a bolt of lightning but as a downgrade in appetites. The sentence begins in the language of consumer culture - "material wants" and "instant gratification" - and then pivots, almost quietly, into metaphysics. That move matters. It suggests the obstacle to connection isn't ignorance or lack of belief; it's noise. Desire, in this view, is less a moral failing than a kind of static that keeps the self stuck at surface level.

The phrasing is deliberately collective: "we get past", "we connect". Wright isn't selling a solitary retreat into enlightenment. She's arguing that a truer interior life has social consequences. The self deepens and, in the same motion, opens outward: to "others" and finally "the universe". It's a three-step widening of the frame, from personal discipline to community to cosmos. The subtext is ecological as much as spiritual: when you stop treating the world as a vending machine for satisfaction, you begin to recognize it as relationship.

Context sharpens the intent. Wright, an Australian poet and activist, wrote with a strong sense of settler history, land, and the moral costs of extraction. Read through that lens, "superficial material wants" sounds like more than private consumerism; it echoes a national habit of taking without listening. Her line proposes an alternative ethic: less acquisition, more attention. Connection, for Wright, is not a mood. It's a practice that changes what you think you're entitled to.