forest for the trees

The Laughing Heart
your life is your life
don't let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
there are ways out.
there is a light somewhere.
it may not be much light but
it beats the darkness.
be on the watch.
the gods will offer you chances.
know them.
take them.
you can't beat death but
you can beat death in life, sometimes.
and the more often you learn to do it,
the more light there will be.
your life is your life.
know it while you have it.
you are marvelous
the gods wait to delight
in you.
 - Charles Bukowski
Betting on the Muse: Poems and Stories



"I am in love with this world. I have climbed its mountains, roamed its forests, sailed its waters, crossed its deserts, felt the sting of its frosts, the oppression of its heats, the drench of its rains, the fury of its winds, and always have beauty and joy waited upon my goings and comings."
 - John Burroughs



"I thought that the world was a vast system of signs, a conversation between giant beings. My actions, the cricket's saw, the star's blink, were nothing but pauses and syllables, scattered phrases from that dialogue. What word could it be, of which I was only a syllable? Who speaks the word? To whom is it spoken?"
 - Octavio Paz



"There are five fundamental relationships to the material world: farming, cooking, clothing, housing and lovemaking. And these are grossly overlooked."
 - Alan Watts



You and I have spent so many hours working.
We have paid dearly for the life we have.
It's all right if we do nothing tonight.

I am so much in love with mournful music
That I don't bother to look for violinists.
The aging peepers satisfy me for hours.

I love to see the fiddlers tuning up their old fiddles,
And the singer urging the low notes to come.
I saw her trying to keep the dawn from breaking.

You and I have worked hard for the life we have.
But we love to remember the way the soul leaps
Over and over into the lonely heavens.
 - Robert Bly
from The Ant



5. Next
If you can orbit the planet, why can't you see
what makes the human heart happy?
Is it art or is it sex?
Or is it, as I suspect, just keeping going

from next thing to next thing
to next thing to next thing
to next to next to next to next
pulsating stupidly to outlast time?
 - Dan Chiasson
Where's The Moon, There's The Moon



"If the point of life is the same as the point of a story, the point of life is character transformation. If I got any comfort as I set out on my first story, it was that in nearly every story, the protagonist is transformed. He's a jerk at the beginning and nice at the end, or a coward at the beginning and brave at the end. If the character doesn't change, the story hasn't happened yet. And if story is derived from real life, if story is just condensed version of life then life itself may be designed to change us so that we evolve from one kind of person to another."
 - Donald Miller
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life



"I'm alive . . . Thinking about it, noticing it, is new. You do things and don't watch. Then all of a sudden you look and see what you're doing and it's the first time, really."
 - Ray Bradbury
Dandelion Wine



Once, Driving West of Billings, Montana
I ran into the afterlife.
No fluffy white clouds. Not even stars. Only sky
dark as the inside of a movie theater
at three in the afternoon and getting bigger all the time,
expanding at terrific speed
over the car which was disappearing,
flattening out empty
as the fields on either side.

It was impossible to think
under that rain louder than engines.
I turned off the radio to listen, let my head
fill up until every bone
was vibrating - sky.

Twice, trees of lightning
broke out of the asphalt. I could smell
the highway burning. Long after, saw blue smoke twirling
behind the eyeballs, lariats
doing fancy rope tricks, jerking silver
dollars out of the air, along with billiard cues, ninepins.

I was starting to feel I could drive forever
when suddenly one of those trees was right in front of me.
Of course, I hit it -
branches shooting stars down the windshield,
poor car shaking like a dazed cow.
I thought this time for sure I was dead
so whatever was on the other side had to be eternity.

Saw sky enormous as nowhere. Kept on driving.
 - Susan Mitchell
The Water Inside the Water



"I'll tell you how the sun rose
A ribbon at a time . . .

It's a living book, this life; it folds out in a million settings, cast with a billion beautiful characters, and it is almost over for you. It doesn't matter how old you are; it is coming to a close quickly, and soon the credits will roll and all your friends will fold out of your funeral and drive back to their homes in cold and still and silence. And they will make a fire and pour some wine and think about how you once were . . . and feel a kind of sickness at the idea you never again will be.

So soon you will be in that part of the book where you are holding the bulk of the pages in your left hand, and only a thin wisp of the story in your right. You will know by the page count, not by the narrative, that the Author is wrapping things up. You begin to mourn its ending, and want to pace yourself slowly toward its closure, knowing the last lines will speak of something beautiful, of the end of something long and earned, and you hope the thing closes out like last breaths, like whispers about how much and who the characters have come to love, and how authentic the sentiments feel when they have earned a hundred pages of qualification.

And so my prayer is that your story will have involved some leaving and some coming home, some summer and some winter, some roses blooming out like children in a play. My hope is your story will be about changing, about getting something beautiful born inside of you, about learning to love a woman or a man, about learning to love a child, about moving yourself around water, around mountains, around friends, about learning to love others more than we love ourselves, about learning oneness as a way of understanding God. We get one story, you and I, and one story alone. God has established the elements, the setting and the climax and the resolution. It would be a crime not to venture out, wouldn't it?"
 - Donald Miller
Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road


><((((º>

"Each of us starts out a watertight vessel. And these things happen - these people leave us, or don't love us, or don't get us, or we don't get them, and we lose and fail and hurt one another. And the vessel starts to crack open in places . . . Once the vessel cracks open, the end becomes inevitable . . . But there is all this time between when the cracks start to open up and when we finally fall apart. And it is only in that time that we can see one another, because we see out of ourselves through our cracks and into others through theirs."
 - John Green
Paper Towns



Forgetting someone is like
forgetting to turn off the light in the back yard
so it stays lit all the next day.

But then it's the light
that makes you remember.
 - Yehuda Amichai



"Mindfulness gives you time. Time gives you choices. Choices, skillfully made, lead to freedom. You don't have to be swept away by your feeling. You can respond with wisdom and kindness rather than habit and reactivity."
 - Bhante Henepola Gunaratana
Beyond Mindfulness in Plain English



"The Zen disciple sits for long hours silent and motionless. Presently he enters a state of impassivity, free from all ideas and all thoughts. He departs from the self and enters the realm of nothingness. This is not the nothingness or the emptiness of the West. It is rather the reverse, a universe of the spirit in which everything communicates freely with everything, transcending bounds, limitless. There are of course masters of Zen, and the disciple is brought toward enlightenment by exchanging questions and answers with his master, and he studies the scriptures. The disciple must, however, always be lord of his own thoughts, and must attain enlightenment through his own efforts. And the emphasis is less upon reason and argument than upon intuition, immediate feeling. Enlightenment comes not from teaching but through the eye awakened inwardly. Truth is in the discarding of words, it lies outside words."
 - Yasunari Kawabata



It's noticing that cracks us open, lets something in.
Shows we're in use.
Uses us.
Right now. Right this minute.
 - Lia Purpura
On Looking: Essays



How to See Deer
Forget roadside crossings.
Go nowhere with guns.
Go elsewhere your own way,
lonely and wanting. Or
stay and be early:
next to deep woods
inhabit old orchards.
All clearings promise.
Sunrise is good,
and fog before sun.
Expect nothing always;
find your luck slowly.
Wait out the windfall.
Take your good time
to learn to read ferns;
make like a turtle:
downhill toward slow water.
Instructed by heron,
drink the pure silence.
Be compassed by wind.
If you quiver like aspen
trust your quick nature:
let your ear teach you
which way to listen.
You've come to assume
protective color; now
colors reform to
new shapes in your eye.
You've learned by now
to wait without waiting;
as if it were dusk
look into light falling:
in deep relief
things even out. Be
careless of nothing. See
what you see.
 - Philip Booth



"There is nothing to fix, nothing to do, nothing needs to be better, nicer, or in a certain way, all that stuff is just thoughts, there's no need to take any interest in it. How things are is just fine. Rest. Rest on the inside."
 - Jac O'Keeffe



"The trouble with you and me is we are used to what is happening to us. We grew into our lives like a kernel beneath the earth, never able to process the enigma of our composition. Nothing is normal. It is all rather odd, isn't it, our eyes in our heads, our hands with five fingers, the capacity to understand beauty, to feel love, to feel pain."
 - Donald Miller
Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road



"I need wonder. I know that death is coming. I smell it in the wind, read it in the paper, watch it on television, and see it on the faces of the old. I need wonder to explain what is going to happen to me, what is going to happen to us when this thing is done, when our shift is over and our kids' kids are still on the earth listening to their crazy rap music. I need something mysterious to happen after I die."
 - Donald Miller



"I've wondered, though, if one of the reasons we fail to acknowledge the brilliance of life is because we don't want the responsibility inherent in the acknowledgment. We don't want to be characters in a story because characters have to move and breathe and face conflict with courage. And if life isn't remarkable, then we don't have to do any of that; we can be unwilling victims instead of grateful participants."
 - Donald Miller
A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life



<°))))><

The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms - just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren't where
the windows
went.
 - Kay Ryan



And every year there is a brief, startling moment
When we pause in the middle of a long walk home and
Suddenly feel something invisible and weightless
Touching our shoulders, sweeping down from the air:
It is the autumn wind pressing against our bodies;
It is the changing light of fall falling on us.
 - Edward Hirsch
from Fall
Wild Gratitude



LXXIV
Why does it linger in the branches
until the leaves fall?

And where are its yellow trousers
left hanging?

Is it true that autumn seems to wait
for something to happen?

Perhaps the trembling of a leaf
or the movement of the universe?

Is there a magnet under the earth,
brother magnet of autumn?

When is the appointment of the rose
decreed under the earth?
 - Pablo Neruda
Book of Questions



XXXIX
Do you not also sense danger
in the sea's laughter?

Do you not see a threat
in the bloody silk of the poppy?

Do you not see that the apple tree flowers
only to die in the apple?

Do you not weep surrounded by laughter
with bottles of oblivion.
 - Pablo Neruda
Book of Questions



"The truth is you already know what it's like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. The truth is you've already heard this. That this is what it's like. That it's what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul."
 - David Foster Wallace
Oblivion



"The mind thinks that there is an observer, an independent you, and that is what is doing the observing. But really there isn't someone who is observing. Consciousness is conscious. Awareness is aware. Observing is observing."
 - Adyashanti



 "We are the eyes of the cosmos. So that in a way, when you look deeply into somebody's eyes, you are looking deeply into yourself, and the other person is looking deeply into the same self, which many-eyed, as the mask of Vishnu is many-faced, is looking out everywhere, one energy playing myriads of different parts."
 - Alan Watts



Where to start?
Everything cracks and shakes,
the air trembles with similes,
No one world's better than another;
the earth moans with metaphors.
 - Osip Mandelstam



"It occurred to me, as it sometimes does, that this day is over and will never be lived again, that we are only the sum of days, and when those are spent, we will not come back to this place, to this time, to these people and these colors, and I wonder whether to be sad about this or to be happy, to trust that these moments were meant for some kind of enjoyment, as a kind of blessing."
 - Donald Miller
Through Painted Deserts: Light, God, and Beauty on the Open Road



Autumn
Autumn is always too early.
The peonies are still blooming, bees  
are still working out ideal states,
and the cold bayonets of autumn  
suddenly glint in the fields and the wind
rages.

What is its origin? Why should it destroy  
dreams, arbors, memories?
The alien enters the hushed woods,  
anger advancing, insinuating plague;  
woodsmoke, the raucous howls
of Tatars.

Autumn rips away leaves, names,  
fruit, it covers the borders and paths,  
extinguishes lamps and tapers; young  
autumn, lips purpled, embraces  
mortal creatures, stealing
their existence.

Sap flows, sacrificed blood,
wine, oil, wild rivers,
yellow rivers swollen with corpses,
the curse flowing on: mud, lava, avalanche,  
gush.

Breathless autumn, racing, blue
knives glinting in her glance.
She scythes names like herbs with her keen  
sickle, merciless in her blaze
and her breath. Anonymous letter, terror,  
Red Army.
 - Adam Zagajewski
translated by Renata Gorczynski
Without End: New and Selected Poems


><((((º>

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn
and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.
Praise the mutilated world
and the gray feather a thrush lost,
and the gentle light that strays and vanishes
and returns.
 - Adam Zagajewski
from Try to praise the mutilated world



"The next suitable person you're in a light conversation with, stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, "What's wrong?" You say it in a concerned way. He'll say, "What do you mean?" You say, "Something's wrong. I can tell. What is it?" And he'll look stunned and say, "How did you know?" He doesn't realize something's always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn't know everybody's always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they're exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing's ever wrong, from seeing it."
 - David Foster Wallace
The Pale King



Three times my life has opened
Three times my life has opened.
Once, into darkness and rain.
Once, into what the body carries at all times within it and
     starts to remember each time it enters the act of love.
Once, to the fire that holds all.
These three were not different.
You will recognize what I am saying or you will not.

But outside my window all day a maple has stepped
     from her leaves like a woman in love with winter, dropping
     the colored silks.
Neither are we different in what we know.
There is a door.  It opens. Then it is closed.  But a slip of
     light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor,
     or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.
 - Jane Hirshfield



It is time to lose your life,
Even if it isn't over.
It is time to say goodbye and try to die.
It is October.

The mellow cello
Allee of trees is almost lost in sweetness and mist
When you take off your watch at sunrise
To lose your life.
 - Frederick Seidel
excerpt from October



"It takes so little, so infinitely little, for a person to cross the border beyond which everything loses meaning: love, convictions, faith, history. Human life - and herein lies its secret - takes place in the immediate proximity of that border, even in direct contact with it; it is not miles away, but a fraction of an inch."
 - Milan Kundera
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting



Leaves
1
Every October it becomes important, no, necessary
to see the leaves turning, to be surrounded
by leaves turning; it's not just the symbolism,
to confront in the death of the year your death,
one blazing farewell appearance, though the irony
isn't lost on you that nature is most seductive
when it's about to die, flaunting the dazzle of its
incipient exit, an ending that at least so far
the effects of human progress (pollution, acid rain)
have not yet frightened you enough to make you believe
is real; that is, you know this ending is a deception
because of course nature is always renewing itself -
the trees don't die, they just pretend,
go out in style, and return in style: a new style.

2
Is it deliberate how far they make you go
especially if you live in the city to get far
enough away from home to see not just trees
but only trees? The boring highways, roadsigns, high
speeds, 10-axle trucks passing you as if they were
in an even greater hurry than you to look at leaves:
so you drive in terror for literal hours and it looks
like rain, or snow, but it's probably just clouds
(too cloudy to see any color?) and you wonder,
given the poverty of your memory, which road had the
most color last year, but it doesn't matter since
you're probably too late anyway, or too early -
whichever road you take will be the wrong one
and you've probably come all this way for nothing.

3
You'll be driving along depressed when suddenly
a cloud will move and the sun will muscle through
and ignite the hills. It may not last. Probably
won't last. But for a moment the whole world
comes to. Wakes up. Proves it lives. It lives -
red, yellow, orange, brown, russet, ocher, vermilion,
gold. Flame and rust. Flame and rust, the permutations
of burning. You're on fire. Your eyes are on fire.
It won't last, you don't want it to last. You
can't stand any more. But you don't want it to stop.
It's what you've come for. It's what you'll
come back for. It won't stay with you, but you'll
remember that it felt like nothing else you've felt
or something you've felt that also didn't last.
 - Lloyd Schwartz
Goodnight, Gracie



"You know, there's a place we all inhabit, but we don't much think about it, we're scarcely conscious of it, and it lasts for less than a minute a day.  It's in the morning, for most of us. It's that time, those few seconds when we're coming out of sleep but we're not really awake yet. For those few seconds we're something more primitive than what we are about to become. We have just slept the sleep of our most distant ancestors, and something of them and their world still clings to us. For those few moments we are unformed, uncivilized. We are not the people we know as ourselves, but creatures more in tune with a tree than a keyboard. We are untitled, unnamed, natural, suspended between was and will be, the tadpole before the frog, the worm before the butterfly. We are for a few brief moments, anything and everything we could be. And then . . . and then  - ah - we open our eyes and the day is before us and . . .  we become ourselves."
 - Jerry Spinelli



"We’'re living our lives madly trying to hold onto everything, and it looks like it might work for awhile but in the end it always fails, and it never was working, and the way to be happy, the way to be loving, the way to be free is to really be willing to let go of everything on every occasion or at least to make that effort."
 - Norman Fischer



"I remember that I did not always know authors were ordinary people living ordinary lives, and that an ordinary life was an obscure life, if we can extend the meaning of obscure to mean covered up by dailiness, glorious dailiness, shameful dailiness, dailiness that is difficult to figure out, that is not always clear until a long time afterward. Obscure: not readily noticed, easily understood, or clearly expressed. Which is a pretty good definition of life."
 - Mary Ruefle



Siddhartha said someone who brushes
against you in the street has
shared an experience
with you for five
hundred
lives.
 - Mary Ruefle
from Talking to Strangers


<°))))><


From Here to Eternity
One day you wake up
and your life is over.
But it doesn't mean
you have to die.
It means last October was yellower
than this, and this the yellowest
anyone can remember.
It means you have produced enough tears
to fill, to one-eighth of an inch
of the top, Lake Baikal,
and now someone would like to swim.
It means what it meant
to listen to the teacher
tell the story of Dante and Beatrice
and break down crying in the middle,
because his wife was taken away by the police
last night, you so happy
to be dismissed early
you and your pals broke out
a pack of cards on the tram.
It means you are more interested
in the shadows of objects than objects
themselves, and if asked to draw anything
you would only need charcoal
to convince the world
it is waiting, in the shadows
of things, and you will wait back.
 - Mary Ruefle
Tristimania