A Settlement Look, it’s spring. And last year’s loose dust has turnedinto this soft willingness. The wind-flowers have comeup trembling, slowly the brackens are up-lifting theircurvaceous and pale bodies. The thrushes have comehome, none less than filled with mystery, sorrow,happiness, music, ambition. And I am walking out into all of this with nowhere togo and… Continue reading Mary Oliver
who took your handwhen you offered it to me. I am the pledge of emptinessthat turned around.Even the trees smiled. Always I was the birdthat flew off through the branches.Now I am the catwith feathersunder its tongue. —Mary Oliver, “I am the one,” Red Bird (Beacon Press, 2008)
Sunrise You candie for it–an idea,or the world. People have done so,brilliantly,lettingtheir small bodies be bound to the stake,creatingan unforgettablefury of light. But this morning,climbing the familiar hillsin the familiarfabric of dawn, I thought of China,and Indiaand Europe, and I thoughthow the sun blazesfor everyone justso joyfullyas it rises under the lashesof my own eyes,… Continue reading Mary Oliver
I think it would be well, and proper, and obedient, and pure, to grasp your one necessity and not let it go, to dangle from it limp wherever it takes you. — Annie Dillard, from “Living Like Weasels,” Teaching a Stone to Talk (HarperCollins, New York, 2009, Kindle Edition)
Words can cause trouble like large rocks in one’s path.Wrong: Words can clear the largest rocks out of the way.Wrong again: Words can turn into dark chasms unbridgeable for a whole lifetime.We know very little about the power and the destructiveness of words. —Tarjei Vesaas, from The Boat in the Evening (Peter Owen Publishers, 2003)
The heart is split in two, irresolute between its desires. Yet the boat has to advance … night or day are merely shifting veils to be traversed. Advance with fierce courage. Not for the sake of men. For the sake of insoluble riddles. In utter secrecy the heart is split in two. —Tarjei Vesaas, The… Continue reading Tarjei Vesaas,
Sometimes 1. Something came upout of the dark.It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.It wasn’t an animalor a flower,unless it was both. Something came up out of the water,a head the size of a catbut muddy and without ears.I don’t know what God is.I don’t know what death is. But I believe they have… Continue reading Mary Oliver
7. Death waits for me, I know it, aroundone corner or another.This doesn’t amuse me.Neither does it frighten me. After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.I walked slowly, and listened to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing. —Mary Oliver,… Continue reading Mary Oliver
The lessons of impermanence taught me this: loss constitutes an odd kind of fullness; despair empties out into an unquenchable appetite for life. ― Gretel Ehrlich, The Solace of Open Spaces (Penguin Books, December 2, 1986)
We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the desire between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the… Continue reading Rebecca Solnit
The Vale of Soul-Making 