"Our senses are indeed our doors and windows on this world, in a very real sense the key to the unlocking of meaning and the wellspring of creativity"
About this Quote
Houston’s line is a sales pitch for wonder, but it’s also a quiet rebuke to the way modern life trains us to mistrust our own perception. By calling the senses “doors and windows,” she turns the body into architecture: not a messy bundle of impulses, but a deliberate interface with reality. The image flatters everyday experience with the dignity of a threshold. You don’t need special access to meaning; you need to notice what’s already arriving.
The subtext is anti-disembodiment. In a culture that prizes abstraction (metrics, credentials, “data-driven” everything), Houston insists that meaning doesn’t start in spreadsheets or theories. It starts in contact: the texture of a moment, the sound of a voice, the smell that detonates memory. Her phrasing, “in a very real sense,” is doing rhetorical work, anticipating the skeptic who hears “senses” and thinks “mere subjectivity.” She’s staking a claim that embodiment is not a lesser way of knowing but the primary one.
Context matters: Houston’s career sits in the late-20th-century human potential and transpersonal psychology orbit, where “creativity” is less about output and more about aliveness. The “key” metaphor completes the argument: perception is not passive reception but an active unlocking. If creativity is the “wellspring,” then attention is the pump handle. The quote works because it makes a spiritual proposition sound practical: train your senses, and you don’t just feel more - you understand more.
The subtext is anti-disembodiment. In a culture that prizes abstraction (metrics, credentials, “data-driven” everything), Houston insists that meaning doesn’t start in spreadsheets or theories. It starts in contact: the texture of a moment, the sound of a voice, the smell that detonates memory. Her phrasing, “in a very real sense,” is doing rhetorical work, anticipating the skeptic who hears “senses” and thinks “mere subjectivity.” She’s staking a claim that embodiment is not a lesser way of knowing but the primary one.
Context matters: Houston’s career sits in the late-20th-century human potential and transpersonal psychology orbit, where “creativity” is less about output and more about aliveness. The “key” metaphor completes the argument: perception is not passive reception but an active unlocking. If creativity is the “wellspring,” then attention is the pump handle. The quote works because it makes a spiritual proposition sound practical: train your senses, and you don’t just feel more - you understand more.
Quote Details
| Topic | Art |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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