shock and awe
I need you, the reader, to imagine us, for we don't really exist if you don't.
- Vladimir Nabokov
"You are the only person I can talk with about the shade of a cloud, about the song of a thought - and about how, when I went out to work today and looked a tall sunflower in the face, it smiled at me with all of its seeds."
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Vladimir Nabokov
To feel yourself wake into change, as if your change
Were immense and figured into the heavens' longing.
And yet all you want is to rise out of the shade
Of yourself into the cooling blaze of a summer night
When the moon shines and the earth itself
Is covered and silent in the stoniness of its sleep.
- Mark Strand
from VII
"Once, years ago, I emerged from the woods in the early morning at the end of a walk and - it was the most casual of moments - as I stepped from under the trees into the mild, pouring-down sunlight I experienced a sudden impact, a seizure of happiness. It was not the drowning sort of happiness, rather the floating sort. I made no struggle toward it; it was given. Time seemed to vanish. Urgency vanished. Any important difference between myself and all other things vanished. I knew that I belonged to the world, and felt comfortably my own containment in the totality. I did not feel that I understood any mystery, not at all; rather that I could be happy and feel blessed within the perplexity."
- Mary Oliver
Long Life
From the shore: Toronto
All afternoon I've watched the gulls
off the breakwater at Lake Ontario.
No one here seems to like them,
how they scavenge,
hover like icons,
against a metal sky.
But I am here from another country
not so foreign as the gulls'
and I like their garrulousness,
their joyful noise
and the way they hang in the air
flying and not flying.
- Henrietta Epstein
"Throughout my whole life, during every minute of it, the world has been gradually lighting up and blazing before my eyes until it has come to surround me, entirely lit from within."
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
"The French called this time of day 'l'heure bleue.' To the English it was 'the gloaming.' The very word 'gloaming' reverberates, echoes - the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour - carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone."
- Joan Didion
Blue Nights
Wait for an Autumn Day
Wait for an autumn day, for a slightly
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day's weather.
Wait for the maple's rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man's hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,
for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire's smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.
Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete's breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,
for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you've lost
is gone for good.
weary sun, for dusty air,
a pale day's weather.
Wait for the maple's rough, brown leaves,
etched like an old man's hands,
for chestnuts and acorns,
for an evening when you sit in the garden
with a notebook and the bonfire's smoke contains
the heady taste of ungettable wisdom.
Wait for afternoons shorter than an athlete's breath,
for a truce among the clouds,
for the silence of trees,
for the moment when you reach absolute peace
and accept the thought that what you've lost
is gone for good.
Wait for the moment when you might not
even miss those you loved
who are no more.
Wait for a bright, high day,
for an hour without doubt or pain.
Wait for an autumn day.
- Adam Zagajewski
Eternal Enemies
translated by Clare Cavanagh
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
- Mary Oliver
from Halleluiah
"What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conundrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy."
- Terry Tempest Williams
elegy, n.
"Your grandfather dies a few months after we move in together. There is no question that I will go with you, but there are plenty of questions when we get to the funeral. I know you haven't slept. I know you've spent the night on the computer, trying to pin down what you feel. I know why you didn't accept my offer to help, just as you know why I felt I had to offer it anyway. On the car ride down, you practice what you're going to say. You use the word confliction when you really should just say conflict, and you use the word remarkability, which I'm not sure is even a word. But I don't say a thing - I just listen to you say them over and over again, because they are what you need to say.
Then we get there, and the first words out of your mother's mouth are "Nobody's speaking at the service." That, more than anything else, throws you off, makes it seem like you've been bequeathed a bad patch of gravity. I'm bombarded from all sides - most people don't know my name, and nobody knows what to call me in relation to you. Something more than a boyfriend, something less than a spouse. I met your grandfather once, and he was nice to me. That's what I can contribute - that I met your grandfather once, and that he was nice to me.
Something happens to us that day. It's there during the service, when you don't let go of my hand. It's there back at your mother's house, where we retreat to your childhood bedroom and go through your old chest of drawers, where we find stale jellybeans and notes from high school you hadn't wanted your mother to unearth. It's there when your mother bursts into tears after most of the guests have gone, and I don't need you to say a word to know I am not to leave the room until you're leaving it with me. We have fallen through the surface of want and are deep in the trenches of need.
That night, driving home, I ask you to tell me stories about your grandfather, and as we travel farther and farther from your mother's house and closer and closer to our own apartment, you unspool the memories and turn them into words. From behind the wheel, I learn the difference between a eulogy and an elegy, and discover which is more vital, in life and in death."
- David Levithan
The Lover's Dictionary
<°))))><
"One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge."
- Lauren Oliver
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning
There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I'm smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone
- W. S. Merwin
"At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one - which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I."
- Dag Hammarskjöld
"Today we are all doing penance every day. We're working hard, trying to make money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, trying to maintain a good relationship or marriage, trying to keep our children safe and happy and educated, trying to keep the world from blowing itself up. We don't need any more penance. We need some joy, an ideal, encouragement, a philosophy worthy of us, a real community, neighbors to keep us from having to go it alone. We need our own religion: our sources of inspiration, hope, and healing."
- Thomas Moore
A Religion of One's Own
'til soon
Even you, raw matter,
even you, lumber, mass and muscle,
vodka, liver and chuckle,
candlelight, paper, coal and cloud,
stone, avocado meat, falling rain,
nail, mountain, hot-press iron,
even you feel saudade,
first-degree burn,
a longing to return home?
Clay, sponge, marble, rubber,
cement, steel, glass, vapor, cloth and cartilage,
paint, ash, eggshell, grain of sand,
first day of autumn, the word spring,
number five, the slap in the face, a rich rhyme,
a new life, middle age, old strength,
even you, matter my dear,
remember when we were only a mere idea?
- Paulo Leminski
translated by Elisa Wouk Almino
"The whole business of what's reality and what isn't has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don't care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That's a place you just can't get into, not entirely anyway, other people's heads. I'll just leave you with this. I don't care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance."
- Mary Oliver
Such Silence
As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.
Such silence!
It really wasn't so far from a town, but it seemed
all the clocks in the world had stopped counting.
So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied.
Sometimes there's only a hint, a possibility.
What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots
than reason.
I hope everyone knows that.
I sat on the bench, waiting for something.
An angel, perhaps.
Or dancers with the legs of goats.
No, I didn't see either. But only, I think, because
I didn't stay long enough.
- Mary Oliver
Blue Horses
"A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies."
- François-René de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
- Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
><((((º>
Blood-red and gold, a perfect circle of leaves
begins to whirl,
slowly at first, keeping the pattern,
clicking against the blacktop
like heels and castanets,
then faster, faster, faster . . .
round as a ruffle, as the swirling
skirts of an invisible dancer.
Swept off into the tangled woods
by the muscular breeze.
The hoarse cheering of crows.
- Dolores Stewart
from Outside
The Nature of Things
The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life;
that's how we bring Dad back.
ゆ
I'll rewrite this whole life and this time there'll be so much love,
you won't be able to see beyond it.
ゆ
I can write the poem and make it disappear
- Warsan Shire
from Backwards
An Inventory of Moons
If you live to be very old, you may see twelve hundred full moons.
Some come in winter and you trudge out into the deep snow to
stand beneath their glow. Others come to you in the city and you
take an elevator up to the roof of the highest building and set out
a couple of folding chairs to watch it glide across the sky. Or the
moon finds you along a foreign shore and you paddle out in some
dingy and scoop its reflection from the waters and drink it down.
The moons of your old age are the most potent but seem few and
far between. They make their way into your marrow and teach it
how to hum. When your final moon arrives, it's as if youth has
come back to you. Though instead of flaunting its yellow hat, now
it's dressed in black.
- David Shumate
Kimonos in the Closet
"On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep."
- Mary Oliver
Long Life
"We remember it by feel. We experience it as a murmur in the night, a longing and restlessness that we can't name, a yearning that tugs at us. Something in our human blood is still searching for it, still listening, still remembering. Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal wrote, "We have always wanted something beyond what we wanted." I have loved those words, how they speak to the longing place inside us that seeks to be whole and connected to the earth."
- Linda Hogan
"Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones - rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms."
- Mary Oliver
Blue Iris: Poems & Essays
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
"It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange."
- Bill Bryson
- I was a statue
untouchable naked
with no other mirror
than the fingers of the air
yielding to thought after thought
with no other sadness
than the rustling of leaves -
- Inger Christensen
from Light: Men's Voices
translated by Susanna Nied
"We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.
ゆ
So it is that we might almost say silence is the tribute we pay to holiness; we slip off words when we enter a sacred space, just as we slip off shoes. A "moment of silence" is the highest honor we can pay someone; it is the point at which the mind stops and something else takes over (words run out when feelings rush in). A "vow of silence" is for holy men the highest devotional act. We hold our breath, we hold our words; we suspend our chattering selves and let ourselves "fall silent," and fall into the highest place of all."
- Pico Iyer
The Eloquent Sounds of Silence
<°))))><
"I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time.
After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage."
- Roberto Bolaño
Antwerp
Rain
As the falling rain
trickles among the stones
memories come bubbling out.
It's as if the rain
had pierced my temples.
Streaming
streaming chaotically
come memories:
the reedy voice
of the servant
telling me tales
of ghosts.
They sat beside me
the ghosts
and the bed creaked
that purple-dark afternoon
when I learned you were leaving forever,
a gleaming pebble
from constant rubbing
becomes a comet.
Rain is falling
falling
and memories keep flooding by
they show me a senseless
world
a voracious
world - abyss
ambush
whirlwind
spur
but I keep loving it
because I do
because of my five senses
because of my amazement
because every morning,
because forever, I have loved it
without knowing why.
- Claribel Alegría
translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Casting Off
"One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people - a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lillian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousands of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn't anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the
middle of the night and
sing?"
- Mary Oliver
from Upstream
"Meanwhile, from the uncertainties of this age, this mad era of ours, we must turn perhaps, to the only certainties - the things upon which our senses seize, the things that delight our eyes, our ears, our skin and to the magic aura created about these things by memory - that so carefully and subtly magnifies the emotionally significant phases of experience, and suppresses all the rest."
- Clarence John Laughlin
in correspondence to Hazel Guggenheim McKinley
10 July 1941
Credo
What good is poetry
if it doesn't stand up
against the lies of government,
if it doesn't rescue us
from the liars that mislead us?
What good is it
if it doesn't speak out, denounce what's going on?
It's nothing
but harmless wordplay
to titillate and distract -
the government knows it,
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.
That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
- to save the world -
this and only this
has been my salvation.
| after C. Miłosz |
- Edward Field
"We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing."
- Konstantin Josef Jireček
"Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is - what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is - what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."
- G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
Even though he
was built to see
the world this
way, he was also
built to
disregard, to be
free of the way
he was built
to see the world.
- Leonard Cohen
What does one say? What can one say?
That death is without a metric,
That it has no metaphor?
That what will remain is what always remains:
The snow; the dark pines, their boughs
Heavy with moisture, and failing;
The clearings we might have crossed;
The footprints we do not leave?
- Charles Wright
><((((º>
Crossing the Swamp
Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything - the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure -
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much as
painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth - a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water - a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud -
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves.
- Mary Oliver
"November - with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes - days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees."
- Lucy Maud Montgomery
"One of the balancing acts of the heart is between allegiance to what we are carrying in thought and the mind's affections and allegiance to what is just here, this moment's actual and entirely self-sufficient existence."
- Jane Hirshfield
"No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you are nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. You're only you, here, now - the present you."
- Ray Bradbury
Song of Autumn
In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come - six, a dozen - to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
- Mary Oliver
"As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I've lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of 'solitude of not belonging' has started invading me like ivy on a wall."
- Clarice Lispector
"Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend , a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country."
- Annie Dillard
An American Childhood
"The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance."
- Annie Dillard
Thus, harnessed to time, facing the inevitable,
constructed by science and fed on inexplicable events
taking place somewhere in the middle of history,
your day goes by. Miles away, the ocean
murmurs to its own beloved creatures, a mountain
applies pressure to the weaving of a golden seam
And in your house, the dog wonders
if you will make it home again. And each day,
despite or because the performance of this feat
is both a mystery and a triumph, somehow
you will. You do.
- Eleanor Lerman
from To Live in This World Requires
"What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here."
- John Updike
<°))))><
"True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'."
- Kathleen Norris
"Sometimes people will say things like, "Your prayers didn't work, but thanks," as if a person could be praying for only one thing. A miracle. A cure. But in the hardest situations, all one can do is to ask for God's mercy: Let my friend die at home, Lord, and not in the hospital. Let her go quickly, God, and with her loved ones present. One Benedictine friend, a gentle, thoughtful man who has been in constant physical pain for years and is now confined to a wheelchair, says of prayer, "Often, all I can do is to ask God, 'Lord, what is it you want from me?'" From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been. People who are in the habit of praying - and they include the mystics of the Christian tradition - know that when a prayer is answered, it is never in a way that you expect. But prayer stumbles over modern self-consciousness and self-reliance, a remarkably ingenuous belief in our ability to set goals and attain them as quickly as possible. I recently received a mailing from a group of New Age witches who state in a kind of creed, their belief that "I can create my own reality and that sending out a positive expectation will bring a positive result." I suspect that only America could have produced Pollyanna witches, part and parcel of our pragmatism, our addiction to self-help and 'how-to.' No wonder we have difficulty with prayer."
- Kathleen Norris
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
- C. S. Lewis
Of Other Worlds
"If one day you become sick of words, as happens to us all, and you grow tired of hearing them, of saying them; if whichever you choose seems worn out, dull, disabled; if you feel nauseated when you hear 'horrible' or 'divine' for some everyday occurrence - you'll not be cured, obviously, by alphabet soup.
You must do the following: cook a plate of al dente spaghetti dressed with the simplest seasoning - garlic, oil and chili. Over the pasta toss in this mixture, grate a layer of Parmesan cheese. To the right of the deep plate full of the spaghetti thus prepared, place an open book. To the left, place an open book. In front of it a full glass of red wine. Any other company is not recommended. Turn the pages of each book at random, but they must both be poetry. Only good poets cure us of an overindulgence in words. Only simple essential food cures us of gluttony."
- Héctor Abad Faciolince
Recipes for Sad Women
Earlier tonight, a young monk, laughing,
splashing my face
with holy water. Then, just as unexpectedly,
he flew down a banister, and
for one millisecond
without feet -
was an angel - robed,
all irrepressibly joy
and good news.
- Kathleen Norris
from Land for the Living
"I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
- Anne Lamott
The Perfect Life
I have a perfect life. It isn't much,
But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive
And happy in a vague way: no disappointments
On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt;
Looking forward in anticipation, looking back
In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day.
I heed the promptings of my inner voice,
And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance
For my own powers and innate superiority - the fake
Security of someone in the grip of a delusion,
In denial, climbing ever taller towers
Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom
With a secret smile, while all the while
Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now
Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful
And strong becomes an object of indifference
Reaching out to no one, as later middle age
Turns old, and the strength is gone.
Right now the moments yield to me sweet
Feelings of contentment, but the human
Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name
To be forgotten soon, as the things I know
Turn into unfamiliar faces
In a strange room, leaving merely
A blank space, like a hole left in the wake
Of a perfect life, which closes over.
- John Koethe
The camera sums up the even flow
of many years in a shot of a river.
The principals from part one
are missing, except for me
who am the connection. The time is now,
and I am playing myself.
- Lisel Mueller
from Beginning with 1914
Alive Together
"I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not wish to think."
- Laura Riding
><((((º>
"After hearts shot through with arrows, we have bunnies followed by a warlike fire in the sky, then ghosts, turkeys to honor more ghosts, and a baby born in a barn who is not yet a ghost but also a ghost, for whom we drag trees inside where they do not belong."
- Mary Ruefle
A Path In The Woods from A New Name
I don't trust the truth of memories
because what leaves us
departs forever
There's only one current of this sacred river
but I still want to remain faithful
to my first astonishments
to recognize as wisdom the child's wonder
and to carry in myself until the end a path
in the woods of my childhood
dappled with patches of sunlight
to search for it everywhere
in museums in the shade of churches
this path on which I ran unaware
a six-year old
toward my primary mysterious aloneness
- Anna Kamieńska
Astonishments
"I read them a poem by Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes:
We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves. But since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center, we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective."
- Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
From a third-story window above the Parc du Portugal,
I've watched the snow come down all day.
As usual, there's no one here. There never is.
Mercifully, the inner conversation is canceled by the white noise of winter.
I am neither the mind, the intellect nor the silent voice within.
That's also canceled.
And now, gentle reader, in what name - in whose name -
do you come to idle with me
in this luxurious and dwindling realms of aimless privacy?
- Leonard Cohen
from Titles
Book of Longing
"My religion is to seek the truth in life and life in the truth, even knowing I'll not find them while I live; my religion is to fight incessantly and tirelessly with mystery."
- Miguel de Unamuno
"The secrets to living are these: First, the past cannot be improved upon. Acknowledge what was and move on. Next, the future cannot be molded. Then, why bother? Last, nothing can ultimately be controlled; Not the past, nor the future, nor the present. Accept this moment as it is. Honoring these three, one lives without shackles."
- Wu Hsin
"In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable."
- Dag Hammarskjöld
Being a Person
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
- William Stafford
How comforting it is, once or twice a year,
To get together and forget the old times.
- James Fenton
A German Requiem: A Poem
<°))))><
Eternal Enemies
translated by Clare Cavanagh
And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.
- Mary Oliver
from Halleluiah
"What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conundrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy."
- Terry Tempest Williams
elegy, n.
"Your grandfather dies a few months after we move in together. There is no question that I will go with you, but there are plenty of questions when we get to the funeral. I know you haven't slept. I know you've spent the night on the computer, trying to pin down what you feel. I know why you didn't accept my offer to help, just as you know why I felt I had to offer it anyway. On the car ride down, you practice what you're going to say. You use the word confliction when you really should just say conflict, and you use the word remarkability, which I'm not sure is even a word. But I don't say a thing - I just listen to you say them over and over again, because they are what you need to say.
Then we get there, and the first words out of your mother's mouth are "Nobody's speaking at the service." That, more than anything else, throws you off, makes it seem like you've been bequeathed a bad patch of gravity. I'm bombarded from all sides - most people don't know my name, and nobody knows what to call me in relation to you. Something more than a boyfriend, something less than a spouse. I met your grandfather once, and he was nice to me. That's what I can contribute - that I met your grandfather once, and that he was nice to me.
Something happens to us that day. It's there during the service, when you don't let go of my hand. It's there back at your mother's house, where we retreat to your childhood bedroom and go through your old chest of drawers, where we find stale jellybeans and notes from high school you hadn't wanted your mother to unearth. It's there when your mother bursts into tears after most of the guests have gone, and I don't need you to say a word to know I am not to leave the room until you're leaving it with me. We have fallen through the surface of want and are deep in the trenches of need.
That night, driving home, I ask you to tell me stories about your grandfather, and as we travel farther and farther from your mother's house and closer and closer to our own apartment, you unspool the memories and turn them into words. From behind the wheel, I learn the difference between a eulogy and an elegy, and discover which is more vital, in life and in death."
- David Levithan
The Lover's Dictionary
"One of the strangest things about life is that it will chug on, blind and oblivious, even as your private world - your little carved-out sphere - is twisting and morphing, even breaking apart. One day you have parents; the next day you're an orphan. One day you have a place and a path. The next day you're lost in the wilderness.
And still the sun rises and clouds mass and drift and people shop for groceries and toilets flush and blinds go up and down. That's when you realize that most of it - life, the relentless mechanism of existing - isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge."
- Lauren Oliver
Old Man At Home Alone in the Morning
There are questions that I no longer ask
and others that I have not asked for a long time
that I return to and dust off and discover
that I'm smiling and the question
has always been me and that it is
no question at all but that it means
different things at the same time
yes I am old now and I am the child
I remember what are called the old days and there is
no one to ask how they became the old days
and if I ask myself there is no answer
so this is old and what I have become
and the answer is something I would come to
later when I was old but this morning
is not old and I am the morning
in which the autumn leaves have no question
as the breeze passes through them and is gone
- W. S. Merwin
"At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose your self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one - which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your I."
- Dag Hammarskjöld
"Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you destroy mystery you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of today) free also to believe in them. He has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees two different pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also."
- G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
- G. K. Chesterton
Orthodoxy
"Today we are all doing penance every day. We're working hard, trying to make money to keep a roof over our heads and food on the table, trying to maintain a good relationship or marriage, trying to keep our children safe and happy and educated, trying to keep the world from blowing itself up. We don't need any more penance. We need some joy, an ideal, encouragement, a philosophy worthy of us, a real community, neighbors to keep us from having to go it alone. We need our own religion: our sources of inspiration, hope, and healing."
- Thomas Moore
A Religion of One's Own
'til soon
Even you, raw matter,
even you, lumber, mass and muscle,
vodka, liver and chuckle,
candlelight, paper, coal and cloud,
stone, avocado meat, falling rain,
nail, mountain, hot-press iron,
even you feel saudade,
first-degree burn,
a longing to return home?
Clay, sponge, marble, rubber,
cement, steel, glass, vapor, cloth and cartilage,
paint, ash, eggshell, grain of sand,
first day of autumn, the word spring,
number five, the slap in the face, a rich rhyme,
a new life, middle age, old strength,
even you, matter my dear,
remember when we were only a mere idea?
- Paulo Leminski
translated by Elisa Wouk Almino
"The whole business of what's reality and what isn't has never been solved and probably never will be. So I don't care to be too definite about anything. I have a lot of edges called Perhaps and almost nothing you can call Certainty. For myself, but not for other people. That's a place you just can't get into, not entirely anyway, other people's heads. I'll just leave you with this. I don't care how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. It's enough to know that for some people they exist, and that they dance."
- Mary Oliver
Such Silence
As deep as I ever went into the forest
I came upon an old stone bench, very, very old,
and around it a clearing, and beyond that
trees taller and older than I had ever seen.
Such silence!
It really wasn't so far from a town, but it seemed
all the clocks in the world had stopped counting.
So it was hard to suppose the usual rules applied.
Sometimes there's only a hint, a possibility.
What's magical, sometimes, has deeper roots
than reason.
I hope everyone knows that.
I sat on the bench, waiting for something.
An angel, perhaps.
Or dancers with the legs of goats.
No, I didn't see either. But only, I think, because
I didn't stay long enough.
- Mary Oliver
Blue Horses
"A moral character is attached to autumnal scenes; the leaves falling like our years, the flowers fading like our hours, the clouds fleeting like our illusions, the light diminishing like our intelligence, the sun growing colder like our affections, the rivers becoming frozen like our lives - all bear secret relations to our destinies."
- François-René de Chateaubriand
Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe
"The major problem - one of the major problems, for there are several - one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them.
To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.
To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job."
- Douglas Adams
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Blood-red and gold, a perfect circle of leaves
begins to whirl,
slowly at first, keeping the pattern,
clicking against the blacktop
like heels and castanets,
then faster, faster, faster . . .
round as a ruffle, as the swirling
skirts of an invisible dancer.
Swept off into the tangled woods
by the muscular breeze.
The hoarse cheering of crows.
- Dolores Stewart
from Outside
The Nature of Things
The poem can start with him walking backwards into a room.
He takes off his jacket and sits down for the rest of his life;
that's how we bring Dad back.
ゆ
I'll rewrite this whole life and this time there'll be so much love,
you won't be able to see beyond it.
ゆ
I can write the poem and make it disappear
- Warsan Shire
from Backwards
An Inventory of Moons
If you live to be very old, you may see twelve hundred full moons.
Some come in winter and you trudge out into the deep snow to
stand beneath their glow. Others come to you in the city and you
take an elevator up to the roof of the highest building and set out
a couple of folding chairs to watch it glide across the sky. Or the
moon finds you along a foreign shore and you paddle out in some
dingy and scoop its reflection from the waters and drink it down.
The moons of your old age are the most potent but seem few and
far between. They make their way into your marrow and teach it
how to hum. When your final moon arrives, it's as if youth has
come back to you. Though instead of flaunting its yellow hat, now
it's dressed in black.
- David Shumate
Kimonos in the Closet
"On the windless days, when the maples have put forth their deep canopies, and the sky is wearing its new blue immensities, and the wind has dusted itself not an hour ago in some spicy field and hardly touches us as it passes by, what is it we do? We lie down and rest upon the generous earth. Very likely we fall asleep."
- Mary Oliver
Long Life
"We remember it by feel. We experience it as a murmur in the night, a longing and restlessness that we can't name, a yearning that tugs at us. Something in our human blood is still searching for it, still listening, still remembering. Nicaraguan poet-priest Ernesto Cardenal wrote, "We have always wanted something beyond what we wanted." I have loved those words, how they speak to the longing place inside us that seeks to be whole and connected to the earth."
- Linda Hogan
"Teach the children. We don't matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin-flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb's-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones - rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this green space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms."
- Mary Oliver
Blue Iris: Poems & Essays
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
"It was one of those sumptuous days when the world is full of autumn muskiness and tangy, crisp perfection: vivid blue sky, deep green fields, leaves in a thousand luminous hues. It is a truly astounding sight when every tree in a landscape becomes individual, when each winding back highway and plump hillside is suddenly and infinitely splashed with every sharp shade that nature can bestow - flaming scarlet, lustrous gold, throbbing vermilion, fiery orange."
- Bill Bryson
- I was a statue
untouchable naked
with no other mirror
than the fingers of the air
yielding to thought after thought
with no other sadness
than the rustling of leaves -
- Inger Christensen
from Light: Men's Voices
translated by Susanna Nied
"We have to earn silence, then, to work for it: to make it not an absence but a presence; not emptiness but repletion. Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think, and so sink below our selves into a place far deeper than mere thought allows. In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.
ゆ
So it is that we might almost say silence is the tribute we pay to holiness; we slip off words when we enter a sacred space, just as we slip off shoes. A "moment of silence" is the highest honor we can pay someone; it is the point at which the mind stops and something else takes over (words run out when feelings rush in). A "vow of silence" is for holy men the highest devotional act. We hold our breath, we hold our words; we suspend our chattering selves and let ourselves "fall silent," and fall into the highest place of all."
- Pico Iyer
The Eloquent Sounds of Silence
"I wrote this book for the ghosts, who, because they're outside of time, are the only ones with time.
After the last rereading (just now), I realize that time isn't the only thing that matters, time isn't the only source of terror. Pleasure can be terrifying too, and so can courage."
- Roberto Bolaño
Antwerp
Rain
As the falling rain
trickles among the stones
memories come bubbling out.
It's as if the rain
had pierced my temples.
Streaming
streaming chaotically
come memories:
the reedy voice
of the servant
telling me tales
of ghosts.
They sat beside me
the ghosts
and the bed creaked
that purple-dark afternoon
when I learned you were leaving forever,
a gleaming pebble
from constant rubbing
becomes a comet.
Rain is falling
falling
and memories keep flooding by
they show me a senseless
world
a voracious
world - abyss
ambush
whirlwind
spur
but I keep loving it
because I do
because of my five senses
because of my amazement
because every morning,
because forever, I have loved it
without knowing why.
- Claribel Alegría
translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Casting Off
"One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people - a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lillian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousands of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn't anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the
middle of the night and
sing?"
- Mary Oliver
from Upstream
"Meanwhile, from the uncertainties of this age, this mad era of ours, we must turn perhaps, to the only certainties - the things upon which our senses seize, the things that delight our eyes, our ears, our skin and to the magic aura created about these things by memory - that so carefully and subtly magnifies the emotionally significant phases of experience, and suppresses all the rest."
- Clarence John Laughlin
in correspondence to Hazel Guggenheim McKinley
10 July 1941
When I die, I will see the lining of the world.
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
- Czesław Miłosz
The other side, beyond bird, mountain, sunset.
The true meaning, ready to be decoded.
What never added up will add Up,
What was incomprehensible will be comprehended.
- And if there is no lining to the world?
If a thrush on a branch is not a sign,
But just a thrush on the branch? If night and day
Make no sense following each other?
And on this earth there is nothing except this earth?
- Even if that is so, there will remain
A word wakened by lips that perish,
A tireless messenger who runs and runs
Through interstellar fields, through the revolving galaxies,
And calls out, protests, screams.
- Czesław Miłosz
Credo
What good is poetry
if it doesn't stand up
against the lies of government,
if it doesn't rescue us
from the liars that mislead us?
What good is it
if it doesn't speak out, denounce what's going on?
It's nothing
but harmless wordplay
to titillate and distract -
the government knows it,
and can always get rid of us if we step out of line.
That I believed in poetry,
even when I betrayed it,
that I came back to its central meaning
- to save the world -
this and only this
has been my salvation.
| after C. Miłosz |
- Edward Field
"We the unwilling, led by the unknowing, are doing the impossible for the ungrateful. We have done so much, with so little, for so long, we are now qualified to do anything, with nothing."
- Konstantin Josef Jireček
"Folk-lore means that the soul is sane, but that the universe is wild and full of marvels. Realism means that the world is dull and full of routine, but that the soul is sick and screaming. The problem of the fairy tale is - what will a healthy man do with a fantastic world? The problem of the modern novel is - what will a madman do with a dull world? In the fairy tales the cosmos goes mad; but the hero does not go mad. In the modern novels the hero is mad before the book begins, and suffers from the harsh steadiness and cruel sanity of the cosmos."
- G. K. Chesterton
Tremendous Trifles
Even though he
was built to see
the world this
way, he was also
built to
disregard, to be
free of the way
he was built
to see the world.
- Leonard Cohen
What does one say? What can one say?
That death is without a metric,
That it has no metaphor?
That what will remain is what always remains:
The snow; the dark pines, their boughs
Heavy with moisture, and failing;
The clearings we might have crossed;
The footprints we do not leave?
- Charles Wright
Crossing the Swamp
Here is the endless
wet thick
cosmos, the center
of everything - the nugget
of dense sap, branching
vines, the dark burred
faintly belching
bogs. Here
is swamp, here
is struggle,
closure -
pathless, seamless,
peerless mud. My bones
knock together at the pale
joints, trying
for foothold, fingerhold,
mindhold over
such slick crossings, deep
hipholes, hummocks
that sink silently
into the black, slack
earthsoup. I feel
not wet so much as
painted and glittered
with the fat grassy
mires, the rich
and succulent marrows
of earth - a poor
dry stick given
one more chance by the whims
of swamp water - a bough
that still, after all these years,
could take root,
sprout, branch out, bud -
make of its life a breathing
palace of leaves.
- Mary Oliver
"November - with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes - days full of a fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees."
- Lucy Maud Montgomery
"One of the balancing acts of the heart is between allegiance to what we are carrying in thought and the mind's affections and allegiance to what is just here, this moment's actual and entirely self-sufficient existence."
- Jane Hirshfield
"No matter how hard you try to be what you once were, you can only be what you are here and now. Time hypnotizes. When you are nine, you think you've always been nine years old and will always be. And then when you turn seventy, you are always and forever seventy. You're in the present, you're trapped in a young now or an old now, but there is no other now to be seen. You're only you, here, now - the present you."
- Ray Bradbury
Song of Autumn
In the deep fall
don't you imagine the leaves think how
comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don't you think
the trees themselves, especially those with mossy,
warm caves, begin to think
of the birds that will come - six, a dozen - to sleep
inside their bodies? And don't you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
vanishes, and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its blue shadows. And the wind pumps its
bellows. And at evening especially,
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
- Mary Oliver
"As time goes by, especially in the last few years, I've lost the knack of being a person. I no longer know how one is supposed to be. And an entirely new kind of 'solitude of not belonging' has started invading me like ivy on a wall."
- Clarice Lispector
"Knowing you are alive is feeling the planet buck under you, rear, kick, and try to throw you; you hang on to the ring. It is riding the planet like a log downstream, whooping. Or, conversely, you step aside from the dreaming fast loud routine and feel time as a stillness about you, and hear the silent air asking in so thin a voice, remember, remember, remember? Then you feel your life as a weekend , a weekend you cannot extend, a weekend in the country."
- Annie Dillard
An American Childhood
"The world's spiritual geniuses seem to discover universally that the mind's muddy river, this ceaseless flow of trivia and trash, cannot be dammed, and that trying to dam it is a waste of effort that might lead to madness. Instead you must allow the muddy river to flow unheeded in the dim channels of consciousness; you raise your sights; you look along it, mildly, acknowledging its presence without interest and gazing beyond it into the realm of the real where subjects and objects act and rest purely, without utterance."
- Annie Dillard
Thus, harnessed to time, facing the inevitable,
constructed by science and fed on inexplicable events
taking place somewhere in the middle of history,
your day goes by. Miles away, the ocean
murmurs to its own beloved creatures, a mountain
applies pressure to the weaving of a golden seam
And in your house, the dog wonders
if you will make it home again. And each day,
despite or because the performance of this feat
is both a mystery and a triumph, somehow
you will. You do.
- Eleanor Lerman
from To Live in This World Requires
"What we beyond doubt do have is our instinctive intellectual curiosity about the universe from the quasars down to the quarks, our wonder at existence itself, and an occasional surge of sheer blind gratitude for being here."
- John Updike
"True hospitality is marked by an open response to the dignity of each and every person. Henri Nouwen has described it as receiving the stranger on his own terms, and asserts that it can be offered only by those who 'have found the center of their lives in their own hearts'."
- Kathleen Norris
"Sometimes people will say things like, "Your prayers didn't work, but thanks," as if a person could be praying for only one thing. A miracle. A cure. But in the hardest situations, all one can do is to ask for God's mercy: Let my friend die at home, Lord, and not in the hospital. Let her go quickly, God, and with her loved ones present. One Benedictine friend, a gentle, thoughtful man who has been in constant physical pain for years and is now confined to a wheelchair, says of prayer, "Often, all I can do is to ask God, 'Lord, what is it you want from me?'" From him I have learned that prayer is not asking for what you think you want but asking to be changed in ways you can't imagine. To be made more grateful, more able to see the good in what you have been given instead of always grieving for what might have been. People who are in the habit of praying - and they include the mystics of the Christian tradition - know that when a prayer is answered, it is never in a way that you expect. But prayer stumbles over modern self-consciousness and self-reliance, a remarkably ingenuous belief in our ability to set goals and attain them as quickly as possible. I recently received a mailing from a group of New Age witches who state in a kind of creed, their belief that "I can create my own reality and that sending out a positive expectation will bring a positive result." I suspect that only America could have produced Pollyanna witches, part and parcel of our pragmatism, our addiction to self-help and 'how-to.' No wonder we have difficulty with prayer."
- Kathleen Norris
"Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up."
- C. S. Lewis
Of Other Worlds
"If one day you become sick of words, as happens to us all, and you grow tired of hearing them, of saying them; if whichever you choose seems worn out, dull, disabled; if you feel nauseated when you hear 'horrible' or 'divine' for some everyday occurrence - you'll not be cured, obviously, by alphabet soup.
You must do the following: cook a plate of al dente spaghetti dressed with the simplest seasoning - garlic, oil and chili. Over the pasta toss in this mixture, grate a layer of Parmesan cheese. To the right of the deep plate full of the spaghetti thus prepared, place an open book. To the left, place an open book. In front of it a full glass of red wine. Any other company is not recommended. Turn the pages of each book at random, but they must both be poetry. Only good poets cure us of an overindulgence in words. Only simple essential food cures us of gluttony."
- Héctor Abad Faciolince
Recipes for Sad Women
Earlier tonight, a young monk, laughing,
splashing my face
with holy water. Then, just as unexpectedly,
he flew down a banister, and
for one millisecond
without feet -
was an angel - robed,
all irrepressibly joy
and good news.
- Kathleen Norris
from Land for the Living
"The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world - if only from time to time."
- Annie Dillard
An American Childhood
- Annie Dillard
An American Childhood
"I think perfectionism is based on the obsessive belief that if you run carefully enough, hitting each stepping-stone just right, you won't have to die. The truth is that you will die anyway and that a lot of people who aren't even looking at their feet are going to do a whole lot better than you, and have a lot more fun while they're doing it."
- Anne Lamott
The Perfect Life
I have a perfect life. It isn't much,
But it's enough for me. It keeps me alive
And happy in a vague way: no disappointments
On the near horizon, no pangs of doubt;
Looking forward in anticipation, looking back
In satisfaction at the conclusion of each day.
I heed the promptings of my inner voice,
And what I hear is comforting, full of reassurance
For my own powers and innate superiority - the fake
Security of someone in the grip of a delusion,
In denial, climbing ever taller towers
Like a tiny tyrant looking on his little kingdom
With a secret smile, while all the while
Time lies in wait. And what feels ample now
Turns colorless and cold, and what seems beautiful
And strong becomes an object of indifference
Reaching out to no one, as later middle age
Turns old, and the strength is gone.
Right now the moments yield to me sweet
Feelings of contentment, but the human
Dies, and what I take for granted bears a name
To be forgotten soon, as the things I know
Turn into unfamiliar faces
In a strange room, leaving merely
A blank space, like a hole left in the wake
Of a perfect life, which closes over.
- John Koethe
The camera sums up the even flow
of many years in a shot of a river.
The principals from part one
are missing, except for me
who am the connection. The time is now,
and I am playing myself.
- Lisel Mueller
from Beginning with 1914
Alive Together
"I for one am resolved to mind or not mind only to the degree where my point of view is no larger than myself. I can thus have a great number of points of view, like fingers, and which I can treat as I treat the fingers of my hand, to hold my cup, to tap the table for me and fold themselves away when I do not wish to think."
- Laura Riding
"After hearts shot through with arrows, we have bunnies followed by a warlike fire in the sky, then ghosts, turkeys to honor more ghosts, and a baby born in a barn who is not yet a ghost but also a ghost, for whom we drag trees inside where they do not belong."
- Mary Ruefle
A Path In The Woods from A New Name
I don't trust the truth of memories
because what leaves us
departs forever
There's only one current of this sacred river
but I still want to remain faithful
to my first astonishments
to recognize as wisdom the child's wonder
and to carry in myself until the end a path
in the woods of my childhood
dappled with patches of sunlight
to search for it everywhere
in museums in the shade of churches
this path on which I ran unaware
a six-year old
toward my primary mysterious aloneness
- Anna Kamieńska
Astonishments
"I read them a poem by Phillip Lopate that someone once sent me, that goes:
We who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting, as a group, to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift. Your analyst is in on it, plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband; and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us. In announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves. But since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center, we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective."
- Anne Lamott
Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
From a third-story window above the Parc du Portugal,
I've watched the snow come down all day.
As usual, there's no one here. There never is.
Mercifully, the inner conversation is canceled by the white noise of winter.
I am neither the mind, the intellect nor the silent voice within.
That's also canceled.
And now, gentle reader, in what name - in whose name -
do you come to idle with me
in this luxurious and dwindling realms of aimless privacy?
- Leonard Cohen
from Titles
Book of Longing
"My religion is to seek the truth in life and life in the truth, even knowing I'll not find them while I live; my religion is to fight incessantly and tirelessly with mystery."
- Miguel de Unamuno
"The secrets to living are these: First, the past cannot be improved upon. Acknowledge what was and move on. Next, the future cannot be molded. Then, why bother? Last, nothing can ultimately be controlled; Not the past, nor the future, nor the present. Accept this moment as it is. Honoring these three, one lives without shackles."
- Wu Hsin
"In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable."
- Dag Hammarskjöld
Being a Person
Be a person here. Stand by the river, invoke
the owls. Invoke winter, then spring.
Let any season that wants to come here make its own
call. After that sound goes away, wait.
A slow bubble rises through the earth
and begins to include sky, stars, all space,
even the outracing, expanding thought.
Come back and hear the little sound again.
Suddenly this dream you are having matches
everyone's dream, and the result is the world.
If a different call came there wouldn't be any
world, or you, or the river, or the owls calling.
How you stand here is important. How you
listen for the next things to happen. How you breathe.
- William Stafford
How comforting it is, once or twice a year,
To get together and forget the old times.
- James Fenton
A German Requiem: A Poem
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