Wise Poets, Philosophy, Personal Writings And Wisdom
Emil Mihai Cioran (April 08, 1911 – June 20, 1995) When I meet friends or people I know who are going through a difficult period, I usually have this advice for them: ‘Spend 20 minutes in a cemetery, and you’ll see that, though your worry won’t disappear, you’ll almost forget about it and you’ll feel …
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Jane Kenyon (May 23, 1947 – April 22, 1995) A second crop of hay lies cutand turned. Five gleaming crowssearch and peck between the rows.They make a low, companionable squawk,and like midwives and undertakerspossess a weird authority. Crickets leap from the stubble,parting before me like the Red Sea.The garden sprawls and spoils. Across the lake …
Continue reading "Wise Poets – Jane Kenyon – Three Songs at the End of Summer"
Simone Weil (February 03, 1909 – August 24, 1943) To desire friendship is a great fault. Friendship should be a gratuitous joy like those afforded by art or life. We must refuse it so that we may be worthy to receive it; it is of the order of grace. It is one of those things …
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Paul Laurence Dunbar (June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906) When summer time has come, and allThe world is in the magic thrallOf perfumed airs that lull each senseTo fits of drowsy indolence;When skies are deepest blue above,And flow'rs aflush,—then most I loveTo start, while early dews are damp,And wend my way in woodland trampWhere …
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Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement. Alice Koller (September 13, 1925 – July 21, 2020) Tao Writer (April 17, 1948) From The Archives Grateful It’s …
(September 19, 1920 - May 20, 2022)🌹 All the dead from wars and natural events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again escaped and felt terrible about and plan to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s never anything new about …
Continue reading "For The Love Of Wisdom – Roger Angell – Death"
Wayne Miller When the dog finally died, dad dug a hole beside the fence and buried her in a boot box. She's gone, but she had a good life,mom said. It's OK to be sad. Next day, the boy came into the kitchen holding the box in front of him. She's not gone. She's still in there, he said. Look.Mom …
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Claudia Hammond (May 23, 1971 -) We know that time has an impact on memory, but it is also memory that creates and shapes our experience of time. Our perception of the past moulds our experience of time in the present to a greater degree than we might realize. It is memory that creates the …
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Eleanor Lerman It is a mild day in the suburbsWindy, a little gray. If there issunlight, it enters through thekitchen window and spreadsitself, thin as a napkin, besidethe coffee cup, pie on a plateWhat am I describing?I am describing a dreamin which nobody has diedThese are our mothers:your mother and mineIt is an empty day; …
Joseph Campbell (March 26, 1904 – October 30, 1987) Whatever my fate is, is what I need. If you bring love to that moment, not discouragement, you will find the strength. Any detour or disarray you can learn from is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!
Busisiwe Mahlangu the old chair is pushed against the door/ the windows are closed/the gate is locked/ the fence has barbed wire to hook the flesh/a good night’s sleep is bought with “caution”:/ pull all the keysout of the doors/do not switch off the lights/ turn over the welcome mats/ tell thedog to start barking …
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I thank You God for most this amazingday: for the leaping greenly spirits of treesand a blue true dream of sky: and for everythingwhich is natural which is infinite which is yes. EE Cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) From The Archives Tao Writer (April 17, 1948) This morning I woke up early, …
Emma Hine My mother calls to tell me a story.She and my father were drivingon a mountain road, and all around,the aspen trees were dying—each one on the mountainside leafless,clutching a sticky gold web in its brancheslike it had caught a rotten cloud.Where the road turned along a cliffthe guardrail was missing.Far below, a red …
Anna Kamieńska (April 12, 1920 – May 10, 1986) I’ve learned to value failed conversations, missed connections, confusions. What remains is what’s unsaid, what’s underneath. Understanding on another level of being.
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) I lived in the first century of world wars.Most mornings I would be more or less insane,The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,The news would pour out of various devicesInterrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.I would call my friends on other devices;They …
Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) We are a people tending toward democracy at the level of hope, on another level, the economy of the nation, the empire of business within the republic, both include in their basic premise the concept of perpetual warfare… To be against war is not enough, it …
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James Harrison (December 11, 1937 – March 26, 2016) Coming out of anesthesia I believedI had awakened in the wrong body,and when I returned to my snazzy hotel roomand looked at Architectural DigestI no longer recognized large parts of the world.There was a cabin for salefor seven million dollars, while mine had costonly forty grand …
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) At a time like this I want to writeabout the joy of your life and not my pain.I want everyone to share your wisdom,hear your laughter, know your devotion to Jehovah,but all I feel is sorrow and devastation.I want to share stories of our closeness,the things that came between …
Diane Seuss I could do it. I could walk into the sea.I have a rental car. It’s blue and low on fuel.I have feet, two, and proximity. I could do it.Others have before me. Jeff Buckley (1997) hewas only 30. Carol Wayne (1985) the Matinee Ladyand a photo spread in Playboy. Dennis Wilson (1983)after diving …
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Karel Čapek (January 09, 1890 – December 25, 1938) All of us have begun to feel that there is something odd and insoluble about the conflicts between world-views, generations, political principles, and whatever else divides us… Hatred, lack of knowledge, fundamental distrust, these are the psychic world of communism… I count myself among the idiots …
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Maya Pindyck Today I am my sister’s sister,my father’s brow,my mother’s squirm,urging my spirit to light. I touch my abdomen,each daughters’ doorwayopened for a few fluorescent minutesthen sewn shutfor good, if not for now. I remain here,even when my form bruises, blooms,or falls away, by way of what it doesor does not say. Instead of …
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Ada Limón I want to focus on how useful poetry can be in our daily lives. Poetry is one of the few art forms that has breath built right into it. It literally wants us to breathe, to pause for a moment and pay attention to what matters. Whether it’s a tree that we are …
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Kwame Opoku-Duku Blessed be the bitternessat your core, that quiet lightgrowing quieter still,like the dull moan that escapesyour lips while you dream.They’ll ask you, child,what you know of suffering.They’ll ask you where it hurtsthe most, when the pain changeslike wavelengths of lightin the evening sky, when the criesof the ancestors ring out to youfrom the …
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Seize the time… Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: The Next Generation) Señor Tao (April 17, 1948 -) April 17, 1998 Since my arrival in November, Esalen has been closed to the public. The highway was damaged by earth slides …
Continue reading "The Grand ReOpening, My Fiftieth Birthday"
Jane Shore Jay and Linda moved to Plateau Roadand brought with them a pair of horses:old Kahlua and his longtime mare.When her heart failed suddenly, Kahlua—a paint the color of the Mexican liqueurand swaybacked like a hammock—went on a hunger strike. Fearingthat he might die from loneliness,Jay and Linda heard about a donkeyhoused unhappily an …
Thích Nhất Hạnh (October 11, 1926 - January 22, 2022) The peace we seek cannot be our personal possession. We need to find an inner peace which makes it possible for us to become one with those who suffer, and to do something to help our brothers and sisters, which is to say, ourselves
Matthew Arnold (December 24, 1822 – April 15, 1888) The sea is calm tonight.The tide is full, the moon lies fairUpon the straits; on the French coast the lightGleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!Only, from the long line …
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William Sidney Porter (O’Henry) (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910) I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you …
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Robert Pinsky (October 20, 1940 -) Walking among the graves for exerciseWhere do you get your ideas how do I stop themLooking for Mike Mazur’s marker I lookedDown at the grass and saw Stanislaw BaranczakOur Solidarity poetry reading in PoznanYears later in Newton now he said I’m a U.S.Liberal with a car like everybody elseWhen …
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Not many of us know who or what we are, said the Doorkeeper. A glimpse is all we get. Ursula K Le Guin I need to express some of the inner things that have and continue to play an active role in my life. I know others have experienced this duality of existence. I am …
Heather McHugh (August 20, 1948 -) I. Daily, the kindergartenerspassed my porch. I lovedtheir likeness and variety,their selves in line like littlemonosyllables, but huggable—I wasn't meant to grab them, ever,up into actual besmooches or downinto grubbiest tumbles, my lot was notto have them, in the flesh.Was it better or worse to lettheir lovability go by …
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John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926–July 17, 1967) It is really easy for us [jazz musicians] to create. We are born with this feeling that just comes out no matter what conditions exist. Otherwise, how could our founding fathers have produced this music in the first place when they surely found themselves (as many of …
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Tadeusz Dąbrowski Paulina, the gardener’s daughter, caresabout flowers doomed to die.If I bring her a bouquet, she frees itfrom the ribbons and gently places it in the hospiceof a vase. When the flowers weaken, she trims their stemsand plucks off their wilting leaves. She takesthe dead ones to the compost, from the restshe forms a …
Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) Art is a matter of enjoyment through the five senses. Unless you can see the beauty all around you everywhere, and enjoy it, you can never comprehend art.
Mark Bibbins In case what Yoko Ono said is true that to name one’s enemy is one’s art injures the art more than the enemyI won’t tell you whois president now I forget the name of the womanwho gave you acupuncture but notof …
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Old age again overtook me. Weariness stole into my limbs, and anguish dozed into my mind. I went to my Ulster cave and dreamed my dream, and I changed into a hawk. I left the ground. The sweet air was my kingdom, and my bright eye stared on a hundred miles. I soared, I swooped; …
Matthew Dickman I haven’t done drugs for threedays so I name each one aftermy sister and mother and brotherand take them out with meon a walk, each one taking turnsleading, each one the leaderof a pack that was bred in the mid-seventies, each leash the colorof glass and the density of a star,I hold each …
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Janna Levin We’re all intrinsically of the same substance…. The fabric of the universe is just a coherent weave from the same threads that make our bodies. How much more absurd it becomes to believe that the universe, space and time could possibly be infinite when all of us are finite.
Clint Margrave In memory of Gerald Locklin Nobody is more surprised than he is.First of all, Toad doesn’t believe in heaven,and secondly, even if he did,he never expected to visit. In fact, he’s minorly disappointed.Has he failed to achieve the properlydebauched life he so often courted? But the food tastes good.And you can drink all …
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Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) You recognize worry as futile and destructive, so you are able to let it go when it happens. You find inner peace and contentment in the present moment. And perhaps you begin to realize that you are not a person but an essential and intrinsic part of the evolution …
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Dilruba Ahmedq To test your pulse as you sleep.Bring the healer the howler the listening ear— Bring an apothecary to mix the tincture—We need the salvethe tablet the capsuleof the hour— Bring sword-eatersand those who will swallow fire—Fetch the guardian to flatten the wheelchair,to hoist it toward heaven:the public shuttle awaitsthe ceaseless trips to the …
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What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be sub specie aeternitatis, can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science… The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth. Carl Jung (July 26, 1875 – …
Joseph Rudyard Kipling (December 30, 1865 – January 18, 1936) If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, But make allowance for their doubting too; If you can wait and not be tired by waiting, Or being …
Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963) Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.
Yesenia Montilla i have diver’s lungs from holding mybreath for so long. i promise youi am not trying to break a recordsometimes i just forget toexhale. my shoulders held tightlynear my neck, i am a ball of tenseliving, a tumbleweed with steel-toedboots. i can’t remember the last timei felt light as dandelion. i can’t rememberthe …
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Woody Guthrie (July 14, 1912 – October 3, 1967) I hate a song that makes you think that you're not any good. [...] Songs that run you down or songs that poke fun at you on account of your bad luck or your hard traveling. I am out to fight those kinds of songs to …
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Adrienne Rich (May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012) Living in the earth-deposits of our historyToday a backhoe divulged out of a crumbling flank of earthone bottle amber perfect a hundred-year-oldcure for fever or melancholy a tonicfor living on this earth in the winters of this climateToday I was reading about Marie Curie:she must have known she suffered from radiation sicknessher body bombarded for years by …
There is no end To what a living world Will demand of you… Do you believe? Belief will not save you. Only actions Guided and shaped By belief and knowledge Will save you. Belief Initiates and guides action — Or it does nothing. Octavia Butler (June 22, 1947–February 24, 2006) I have written about …
Now out of this vast silencethe cherry trees scraping their gnarled limbson the sky, and the wind hurls downa flurry of petals, a snowstorm really,a thousand prints on the wet pavement,each one a pair of white shutters, opening.Numinous, the souls of the dead, and now you,. . . among them—an intake of breath.How little it …
Annelies Marie Frank (June 12, 1929 – February or March 1945) I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a …
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Meghan Dunn I too am sick of the body.I too am sick of being a body,am sick of being sick about my body,have made myself sick over how to care forand clothe it, how to make it behave,make it need less. Walking in the street,I have wished it might dissolveso that I might more clearly …
Charles M Blow And I have come to see things clearly again — things that seem so simple to me now, but that somehow I couldn’t see then: that life is a series of peaks and valleys, and it is a fool’s errand to try to flatten them out. That beauty is in the connections …
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Rainer Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) Before us great Death standsOur fate held close within his quiet hands.When with proud joy we lift Life's red wineTo drink deep of the mystic shining cupAnd ecstasy through all our being leaps—Death bows his head and weeps.
We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice, our life as a sudden, emphatic statement, one we can recognize as our own and one from which now, …
Jane Mead (August 13, 1958 – September 8, 2019) I wonder if I will miss the mossafter I fly off as much as I miss it nowjust thinking about leaving. There were stones of many colors.There were sticks holding bothlichen and moss.There were red gates with oldhand-forged hardware.There were fields of dry grasssmelling of first …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) Forgiving, in other words, is the only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly, unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven. The freedom contained in …
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Ursula K Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) Time says “Let there be”every moment and instantlythere is space and the radianceof each bright galaxy.And eyes beholding radiance.And the gnats’ flickering dance.And the seas’ expanse.And death, and chance.Time makes roomfor going and coming homeand in time’s wombbegins all ending.Time is being and beingtime, …
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Hermann Hesse (July 02, 1877 – August 09, 1962) Great masses of people these days live out their lives in a dull and loveless stupor. Sensitive persons find our inartistic manner of existence oppressive and painful, and they withdraw from sight… I believe what we lack is joy. The ardor that a heightened awareness imparts …
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Louis Burke Jenkins (October 28, 1942 – December 21, 2019) "It's no use," he says, "she's left me." This is afterseveral drinks. It's as if he had said, "Van Gogh ismy favorite painter." It's a cheap print he has addedto his collection. He's been waiting all evening toshow it to me. He doesn't see it. …
I think a lot about the word tenacity. What it takes to survive in a world that is sometimes beautiful and sometimes hostile. I’m always amazed at the body’s willingness to continue, to keep going. The heart that keeps pumping, the lungs that keep breathing, the way the will to live can outsmart those other …
Patricia Fargnoli (November 16, 1937 – February 18, 2021) I wake up to a world that is invisible,no golden trees, no picnic spread on the lawn.The ladies in hats have finished their teaand moved on. None of the questions I spent life askinghave been answered.Transience, evanescence, the dispersal of dust.God knows where, and is no …
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James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at …
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Nicholas Laird A human is not such a perfect machine.I didn’t design it for interaction particularlywith other machines—not closely—not non-stop.I made the campfire, for example, to be nature’stelevision but with a human being basicallyI was thinking of a tree, of what a tree needs.A root system, distance, light and air. Even livingyou are tearing through …
Chah Subhaddo known in English as Ajahn Chah (June 17, 1918 – January 16, 1992) If you let go a little, you have a little peace. If you let go a lot, you have a lot of peace. If you let go completely, you have complete peace.
Theodore J. Kooser (April 25, 1939) In the musty light, in the thin brown airof damp carpet, doll heads and rust,beneath long rows of sharp footfallslike nails in a lid, an old man standstrying on glasses, lifting each pairfrom the box like a glittering fishand holding it up to the lightof a dirty bulb. Near …
Continue reading "Wise Poets – Ted Kooser – In the Basement of the Goodwill Store"
Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no results, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Simone Adolphine Weil ( February 03, 1909 – August 24, 1943) Saturday was the first warm sunny rainless day in almost two weeks. So the last …
Continue reading "Sweating Out My Demons While Dancing With Angels"
Angelina Weld Grimké (February 27, 1880 – June 10, 1958) Little grey dreams,I sit at the ocean’s edge,At the grey ocean’s edge,With you in my lap. I launch you, one by one,And one by one,Little grey dreams,Under the grey, grey, clouds,Out on the grey, grey, sea,You go sailing away,From my empty lap,Little grey dreams. Sailing! …
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Naomi Shihab Nye (March 12, 1952 -) Two helpful words to keep in mind at the beginning of any writing adventure are pleasure and spaciousness. If we connect a sense of joy with our writing, we may be inclined to explore further. What’s there to find out? Perhaps too much stock has been placed in …
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Afaa M. Weaver This wall is a great stairway, wallsare things that shoot up, keep out, linethe places where we mark the halls that carry our names. The bustsof this one and that one, this historyis in the hard labor of hearts, thrusts of piston and valve. I sit downat the first house, dizzy at …
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Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We, none of us, choose the century we are born in, or the skin we are born in, or the chromosomes we are born with. We don’t choose the incredibly narrow band of homeostasis within which we can be alive at all — in bodies that die when their …
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Florence Margaret Smith, better known as Stevie Smith (September 20, 1902 – March 07, 1971) Nobody heard him, the dead man,But still he lay moaning:I was much further out than you thoughtAnd not waving but drowning. Poor chap, he always loved larkingAnd now he’s deadIt must have been too cold for him his heart gave …
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Seize the time… Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again. Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: The Next Generation) Everything dies. It is just a question of when. Life was never inevitable. There was no possible preparation for life. It happened. However, death is inevitable for everything …
Ellen Bass(June 16, 1947 -) Cook a large fish—choose one with many bones, a skeletonyou will need skill to expose, maybe the flyingsilver carp that’s invaded the Great Lakes, tumblingthe others into oblivion. If you don’t livenear a lake, you’ll have to travel.Walking is best and shows you mean it,but you could take a train …
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Václav Havel (October 5, 1936–December 18, 2011) There is far more at stake here than simply standing up to those who would like once again to divide the world into spheres of interest, or subjugate others who are different from them, and weaker. What is now at stake is saving the human race. In other …
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Yalie Saweda Kamara While sipping coffee in my mother’s Toyota, we hear the birdcall of two teenage boysin the parking lot: Aiight, one says, Besaydoo, the other returns, as they reachfor each other. Their cupped handshake pops like the first, fat, firecrackers of summer, their fingers shimmy as if they’re solving a Rubik’s cube just …
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Léon Bloy (July 11, 1846–November 3, 1917) There is no human being on earth capable of declaring with certitude who he is. No one knows what he has come into this world to do, what his acts correspond to, his sentiments, his ideas, or what his real name is, his enduring Name in the register …
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Sarah Freligh I’m driving home from school when the radio talkturns to E.B. White, his birthday, and I exitthe here and now of the freeway at rush hour, travel back into the past, where my mother is readingto my sister and me the part about Charlotte laying her eggsand dying, and though this is the …
When you recognize that we are the product of purposeless, mindless laws of physics playing themselves out on our particles — because we are, all, bags of particles — it changes the way you search for meaning and purpose: You recognize that looking out to the cosmos to find some answer that’s sort of floating …
John Paul Martinez For Lolo Ma says not to swat at the houseflychirring in our headspace for the past two hoursbecause it just might be you. Ma shows me the flimsy browned picturesof you & me in your workshop, a scored-leather tool belt strapped acrossyour chest like a bandolier. My whole body smaller stillthan a …
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Françoise Sagan (June 21, 1935 – September 24, 2004) I have loved to the point of madness; that which is called madness, that which to me, is the only sensible way to love… Love lasts about seven years. That's how long it takes for the cells of the body to totally replace themselves.
James Crews The night my mother turned back the clocksI thought that while we slept the hours stolenfrom everyone on earth would collect like coinsin a bank vault, so we’d wake up rich at last.Even as my mother explained that it meantonly extra dreams in winter, only late lightreturned to us with daffodils and rain …
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Mary Jane Oliver (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) One thing I do know is that poetry, to be understood, must be clear. It mustn’t be fancy. I have the feeling that a lot of poets writing now […] sort of tap dance through it. I always feel that whatever isn’t necessary shouldn’t be …
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Guillaume Apollinaire (August 26, 1880 – November 09,1918) I stand here in the sight of everyone a man full of senseKnowing life and knowing of death what a living man can knowHaving gone through the griefs and happinesses of loveHaving known sometimes how to impose his ideasKnowing several languagesHaving travelled more than a littleHaving seen …
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But the man who comes back through the door in the wall will never be quite the same as the man who went out. He will be wiser, but less cocksure, happier but less self satisfied, humbler in acknowledging his ignorance yet better equipped to understand the relationship of words to things of systematic reasoning …
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (December 04, 1875 – December 29, 1926) His vision, from the constantly passing bars,has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else.It seems to him there are a thousand bars;and behind the bars, no world. As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,the movement of his …
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Aldous Huxley (July 26, 1894 – November 22, 1963) Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back …
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Charlotte Mary Mew (November 15, 1869 – March 24, 1928) I remember rooms that have had their partIn the steady slowing down of the heart.The room in Paris, the room at Geneva,The little damp room with the seaweed smell,And that ceaseless maddening sound of the tide—Rooms where for good or ill—things died.But there is the …
Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Most humans are still, almost literally, possessed by thought. They don’t think, but thinking happens to them. The beginning of spiritual awakening is the realization that you are not the voice in your head but the one who is aware of the voice. You are the awareness behind your …
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Elsa Gidlow (December 29, 1898 – 08, June 1986) I shall never have any fear of love,Not of its depth nor its uttermost height,Its exquisite pain and its terrible delight.I shall never have any fear of love. I shall never hesitate to go downInto the fastness of its abyssNor shrink from the cruelty of its …
Several times now I have stressed the fact that whatever “it” is one gets here at Big Sur, one gets it harder, faster, straighter than one would elsewhere. I come back to it again. I say, the people here are fundamentally no different from the people elsewhere. Their problems are basically the same as those …
Continue reading "Closer to Root, Further into Sky – Prologue"
Kim Dower Barbara, my childhood piano teacherplayed Chopin like he was whisperinginto her hands, all us kids from the buildinghad our Saturday morning lessons, apartment 6C,our giddy fingers trotting in the key of G,lifting high for Mozart, metronome tickingas her coffee brewed, her sandy-haired husbandat the wooden breakfast table, mug, cigarettetight in his hands, he …
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Margaret Higgins Sanger (September 14, 1879 – September 6, 1966) No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.
Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) It was almost silentexcept for the constant buzz of life between my earsThen the cooing of the mourning doves perchedon the terrace looking for leftover seeds attracted me.They take flight and I hear the beating of wings against invisible air.I see the plants moving with the breezes but no …
David Whyte We withdraw not to disappear, but to find another ground from which to see; a solid ground from which to step, and from which to speak again, in a different way, a clear, rested, embodied voice, our life as a sudden, emphatic statement, one we can recognize as our own and one from …
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Li-Young Lee (August 19, 1957 -) I loved you before I was born.It doesn’t make sense, I know. I saw your eyes before I had eyes to see.And I’ve lived longingfor your every look ever since.That longing entered time as this body.And the longing grew as this body waxed.And the longing grows as this body …
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January came and disappeared so quickly this year, or perhaps it disappears as quickly every year. I just did not notice until this year. January is appropriately named after the two faced Greek god Janus. One of his faces looks to the past, the other to the future. So January represents a beginning and an …
She wasn’t a good cat. Wouldn’t let us pick her upor cuddle on the bed. Sometimes she’d permit petting, but only if she was in the mood, and onher own terms. If she was perched on a chair, perhaps you might approach. But now, at fifteen, she’s stoppedeating and drinking, sleeps all day. Instead of …
Roger Angell (September 19, 1920 -) What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. […] It no longer matters so much what the caring …
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Ursula K. Le Guin (October 21, 1929 – January 22, 2018) Very slowly burning, the big forest treestands in the slight hollow of the snowmelted around it by the mild, longheat of its being and its will to beroot, trunk, branch, leaf, and knowearth dark, sun light, wind touch, bird song.Rootless and restless and warmblooded, …
Erin Westgate Although some people’s lives may be higher on one dimension than others, happiness, meaning, and richness represent three components or dimensions of the good life, rather than independent types of life.
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1962) In the room where we lie, lightstains the drawn shades yellow.We sweat and pull at each other, climbwith our fingers the slippery ladders of rib.Wherever our bodies touch, the fleshcomes alive. Head and need, like invisibleanimals, gnaw at my breasts, the softinsides of your thighs. What I wantI simply reach …
My motto for the last 40 years or so has been “I Am Here!” This is more than a declaration. It is a revelation. I am here to grow in wisdom and to develop a greater capacity to love. I am a finite physical manifestation of an infinite energy source. This life is a true …
Stephen Elliot Dunn (June 24, 1939 – June 24, 2021) The room has no choice.Everything that’s spoken in itit absorbs. And it must put up with the bad flirt, the overly perfumed,the many murderers of mood—with whomever chooses to walk in. If there’s a crowd, one personis certain to be concealing a sadness,another will have …
William Wordsworth (April 07, 1770 – April 23, 1850) Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origins from emotion recollected in tranquility. The emotion is contemplated till, by a species of reaction, the tranquility gradually disappears.
Emily Jane Brontë (July 30, 1818 – December 19, 1848) No coward soul is mineNo trembler in the world's storm-troubled sphereI see Heaven's glories shineAnd Faith shines equal arming me from Fear O God within my breastAlmighty ever-present DeityLife, that in me hast rest,As I Undying Life, have power in Thee Vain are the thousand …
Continue reading "Wise Poets – Emily Bronte – No Coward Soul Is Mine"
Priscilla Denise Levertov (October 24, 1923 – December 20, 1997) When I opened the doorI found the vine leavesspeaking among themselves in abundantwhispers. My presence made themhush their green breath,embarrassed, the wayhumans stand up, buttoning their jackets,acting as if they were leaving anyway, as ifthe conversation had endedjust before you arrived. I likedthe glimpse I had, though,of …
That which we call imagination is from the first an attribute of the senses themselves; imagination is not a separate mental faculty (as we so often assume) but is rather the way the senses themselves have of throwing themselves beyond what is immediately given, in order to make tentative contact with the other sides of …
Thich Nhat Hanh (October 11, 1926 - January 22, 2022) 🌹 March 16, 2007 Vietnamese Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh (AP Photo, file) If you pour a handful of salt into a cup of water, the water becomes undrinkable. But if you pour the salt into a river, people can continue to draw the water …
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Joseph Stroud Trying to tie my shoes, clumsy, not able to work outthe logic of it, fumbling, as my father stands there,his anger growing over a son who can’t even dothis simplest thing for the first time, can’t even managethe knot to keep his shoes on—You think someone’sgoing to tie your shoes for you the …
Steve Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) When you grow up, you tend to get told that the world is the way it is, your life is just to live your life inside the world, try not to bash into the walls too much, try to have a nice family, have fun, …
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David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) Sometimesif you move carefullythrough the forest,breathinglike the onesin the old stories,who could crossa shimmering bed of leaveswithout a sound,you come to a placewhose only taskis to trouble youwith tinybut frightening requests,conceived out of nowherebut in this placebeginning to lead everywhere.Requests to stop whatyou are doing right now,andto stop what …
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) The arguments about abortion in the US are about one thing: controlling women… A lot of people with a lot of power don’t see why women should have jurisdiction over their own bodies. That’s the anti-abortion argument in a nutshell, in that they claim a foetus, or even an …
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George Bilgere Jane, the old woman across the street,is lugging big black trash bags to the curb.It's snowing hard, and the bags are turning white,gradually disappearing in the storm. Jane is getting ready to put her house on the marketand move into a home of some sort. A facility.She's just too old to keep the …
I feel — everything. It is my genius. It burns me like fire. Mary MacLane (1861–1929) I too am a creature of intense passionate feelings. I tried to hide it as a child but everyone knew. There was no hiding it or escape from it. At an early age I could feel the feeling of …
Rob Brezsny What does it mean to feel real? Some people have a hard time doing that. They have such false ideas about who they are that they rarely feel real. Others are so distracted by trivial longings that they never have the luxury of settling into the exquisite at-home-ness of feeling real. For those …
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Sophie Jewett (June 3, 1861 – October 11, 1909), aka Ellen Burroughs I have read somewhere that the birds of fairyland are white as snow. W B Yeats (June 13, 1865 – January 28, 1939) Where all the trees bear golden flowers,And all the birds are white;Where fairy folk in dancing hoursBurn stars for candlelight; Where …
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Ernest Hemingway (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) Writing, at its best, is a lonely life. Organizations for writers palliate the writer's loneliness but I doubt if they improve his writing. He grows in public stature as he sheds his loneliness and often his work deteriorates. For he does his work alone and if …
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Alfonsina Storni (May 29, 1892 – October 25, 1938) Teeth of flowers, bonnet of dew,hands of grass, you, lovely nursemaid,turn down the earthen sheets for meand the quilt of weeded moss. I’m going to sleep, my nurse, tuck me in,put a lamp on my headboard;a constellation; whichever you like;both are fine; lower the light a little. Leave …
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Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) I have no Life but this —To lead it here —Nor any Death — but lestDispelled from there — Nor tie to Earths to come —Nor Action new —Except through this extent —The Realm of you —
Milan Kundera (April 01, 1929 -) We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come… There is no means of testing which decision is better, because there is no basis for comparison. We live everything …
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Señor Tao (April 17, 1948 -) Until last year I remembered the date January 6th only as my mother’s birthday. She would have be ninety-six years old today. Now this day has an added memory. January 06, 2021 is as etched into my mind as September 11, 2001 and November 22, 1963, the day JFK …
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) We read for countless reasons and books transform us in countless ways, reckoned and unreckoned. We read the way we love — with our whole selves, with the flickering constellation of values, longings, traumas, joys, hopes, despairs, formative experiences, and half-remembered impressions composing the self. We read with our …
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Alex Dimitrov (November 30 1984 -) I was just beginningto wonder about my own lifeand now I have to return to itregardless of the weatheror how close I am to love.Doesn’t it bother you sometimeswhat living is, what the day has turned into?So many screens and meetingsand things to be late for.Everyone truly deservesa flute …
I am eating a mango over the kitchen sink. (The best way to eat a mango.) The one I purchased at the farmer’s market from a man with round wise eyes, a reflection I thought, as the juice dripped slowly over my lips, down my chin and onto my long fingers soon to be sucked …
Sunrise On A New Year Another year, another journey via an elliptical orbit around a yellow star in a solar system named the Milky Way. Although there is no spiritual difference between December 31st and January 1st, each year at this time I find myself preparing for a new beginning. The start of a new …
Even those of us who have not filled the bathtub with emergency water, withdrawn extra cash from the bank and stocked up on food will be entering the new millennium sobered by the awareness that unknown problems of our own making are an enduring part of existence. New York Times This prediction has proven to …
Clare of Assisi, born Chiara Offreduccio (July 16, 1194 – August 11, 1253) There are some who do not pray nor make sacrifices; there are many who live solely for the idolatry of their senses. There should be compensation. There should be someone who prays and makes sacrifices for those who do not do so. …
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William Blake (November 28, 1757 – August 12, 1827) Thou fair-haired angel of the evening,Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, lightThy bright torch of love; thy radiant crownPut on, and smile upon our evening bed!Smile on our loves; and, while thou drawest theBlue curtains of the sky, scatter thy silver dewOn every flower …
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David Suzuki (March 24, 1936 -) Concentration is not to try hard to watch something. In zazen if you try to look at one spot you will be tired in about five minutes. This is not concentration. Concentration means freedom. So your effort should be directed at nothing. You should concentrate on nothing.
Richie Hofmann You were my second lover.You had dark eyes and hair,like a painting of a man.We lay on our stomachs reading books in your bed.I e-mailed my professor. I will be absentfrom French Novel due to sickness. You put onsome piano music. Even thoughit was winter, we had to keepthe window open day and …
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Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) Now, when it is hard to hold for a moment the giant clusters of event and meaning that every day appear, it is time to remember [poetry], which has forever been a way of reaching complexes of emotion and relationship, the attitude that is like the attitude of …
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Anna Andreyevna Gorenko (June 11, 1889 – 05, March 1966) better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova Here is my gift, not roses on your grave,not sticks of burning incense.You lived aloof, maintaining to the endyour magnificent disdain.You drank wine, and told the wittiest jokes,and suffocated inside stifling walls.Alone you let the terrible stranger …
Continue reading "Wise Poets – Anna Akhmatova – In Memory of M. B."
Willa Cather (December 7, 1873 – April 24, 1947) Many people seem to think that art is a luxury to be imported and tacked on to life. Art springs out of the very stuff that life is made of. Most of our young authors start to write a story and make a few observations from …
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Robert Elwood Bly (December 23, 1926) After writing for a week alone in my old shack,I guide the car through Ortonville around midnight. The policeman talks intently in his swivel chair.The light from above shines on his bald head. Soon the car picks up speed again beside the quarries.The moonspot on the steel tracks moves …
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Peter Russell The call to let go lies at the heart of the world’s spiritual traditions. Not being attached to outcomes, surrendering desires, accepting the present, opening to a higher power, relinquishing the ego, practicing forgiveness — all entail letting go. Why is letting go deemed so important? Holding on, these teachings repeatedly affirm, limits …
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He stands at the window baffledby pleasure and how brief it is.Pleasure followed by the memoryof pleasure. Lightthen dark with a splinterleft in. Something like that.The woman in the chair is reading,drinking tea in the ground glasshaze of evening.The sudden swell he feelswatching herilluminates the past she spentgetting to this place:a lover who left, perhaps. …
Adyashanti (October 26, 1962 -) This whole universe is indeed a mirror. So if you are resisting something, what you get back is your experience of resisting something. . . . It's like you walk up to God's vending machine and you say, 'I really don't want to have this experience.' And you put that …
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Wendell Berry (August 05, 1934 -) I leave behind evenmy walking stick. My knifeis in my pocket, but thatI have forgot. I bringno car, no cell phone,no computer, no camera,no CD player, no fax, noTV, not even a book. I gointo the woods. I sit ona log provided at no cost.It is the earth I've …
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Carl Gustav Jung ( July 26, 1875 – June 06, 1961) It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects …
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Cathy Song (August 20, 1955 -) To prepare the body,aim for the translucent perfectionyou find in the sliced shavingsof a pickled turnip.In order for this to happen,you must avoid the sun,protect the faceunder a paper parasoluntil it is bruised whitelike the skin of lilies.Use white soapfrom a blue porcelaindish for this. Restrict yourself.Eat the whites …
Brenda Ueland (October 24, 1891 – March 5, 1985) Think of yourself as an incandescent power, illuminated and perhaps forever talked to by God and his messengers… Since you are like no other being ever created since the beginning of time, you are incomparable.
David Watts He stands at the window baffledby pleasure and how brief it is.Pleasure followed by the memoryof pleasure. Lightthen dark with a splinterleft in. Something like that.The woman in the chair is reading,drinking tea in the ground glasshaze of evening.The sudden swell he feelswatching herilluminates the past she spentgetting to this place:a lover who …
Continue reading "Wise Poets – David Watts – Man at the Window"
Steven Paul Jobs (February 24, 1955 – October 5, 2011) Apple Here’s to the crazy ones.The misfits.The rebels.The troublemakers.The round pegs in square holes.The ones who see things differently.There’re not fond or rules.And they have no respect for the status quo.You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them,disbelieve them, glorify them or vilify them.About …
Ariel Francisco I heard them and I still hear themabove the threatening shrieks of police sirensabove the honking horns of morning traffic,above the home-crowd cheers of Yankee Stadiumabove the school bells and laughterlighting up the afternoonabove the clamoring trudge of the 1 trainand the 2 and 4, 5, 6, the B and the Dabove the …
Alexandra Tempus We are now at the dawn of America’s Great Climate Migration Era. For now, it is piecemeal, and moves are often temporary. … But permanent relocations, by individuals and eventually whole communities, are increasingly becoming unavoidable.
Kathleen A Dale i. Nine thousand years seems long but for the imagination: see a Siberian girl smile as she reaches out to touch the saggital crest (shaped like an arrow, indicating strong jaw muscles) on the head of a Husky, once-removed from wolf, panting by the fire after pulling home a sled of reindeer meat. Now, see them …
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Michael Coleman Talbot (September 29, 1953 – May 27, 1992) Time and again the limits of our language define the limits of our understanding of the universe. The indistinguishability of subatomic particles points out still another weakness of our linguistic approach to understanding reality. For instance, all electrons are exactly alike. It is as if …
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Jorie Graham (May 09, 1950 -) you ask meagain—whyputting your tiny hand onthe not yetunsheathedbud on therhododendronand I seeI need to be skyI need to be soilthere are no wordsfor why that Ican find fastenough, whyyou say atthe foot of the cherry’s wideblossomfallis it dead now whydid it let go, why,tossed outinto what appearsto be …
Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Many narratives, especially the repetitive ones, generate anxiety, anger, hatred, and other negative emotions. These narratives constitute what we might call the unobserved mind. This unobserved mind is responsible for most of the human-made suffering on the planet, both personal and collective.
Maurice Manning One morning when the weather was strangeand haunted following a rain—I believe a fog had settled likea thought over the field and the sunthat peered through it troubled the thought—I remember saying to myself,for no one was around, it’s likewe’re living in a Turner painting,a haunted cave of melodyso indistinct, almost unseen.As if …
Marvin Hartley Bell (August 3, 1937 – December 14, 2020) Much of our lives involves the word 'no.' In school we are mostly told, 'Don't do it this way. Do it that way.' But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.
Seamus Justin Heaney (April 13, 1939 – August 30, 2013) I can feel the tugof the halter at the napeof her neck, the windon her naked front.It blows her nipplesto amber beads,it shakes the frail riggingof her ribs.I can see her drownedbody in the bog,the weighing stone,the floating rods and boughs.Under which at firstshe was …
Valerie Andrews Children have a magical capacity to see the land as an animal does; to experience the sky from the perspective of a flower or a bee; to feel the earth quiver and breathe beneath us; to know a hundred different smells of mud and listen unselfconsciously to the soughing of the trees.
Jim Peterson For Harriet I followed you up the faceof that cliff-riddled mountain.I am tall, stiff, scared of heights. You are small, lithe, quick and notscared of anything in the physicalworld. At first the easy handholds and footholds gave me confidence.But narrow ledges curving underoverhangs began to take their toll. I stalled, my face pressed …
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Ezra Klein (May 09, 1984 -) The conventional wisdom is that there is some argument, yet unmade and perhaps undiscovered, that will change the minds of the roughly 30 percent of American adults who haven’t gotten at least one dose. There probably isn’t … Polio and measles were murderous, but their near elimination required vaccine …
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Tao Writer (April 17, 1948 -) For most of my adult life I have been a holder. I draw away the pain as best I can.I am the one who holds. Arms are good for that. They were made to wrap around and embrace. Arms cannot run like legs or see like eyes, but they …
Kim Addonizio (July 31, 1954 -) What I've learned is simple: if you nurture it, it will expand, and it will nurture you in return. I have also learned that it is a kind of salvation. Sometimes it's more than enough and sometimes it's not enough — by that I mean one's own creativity. If …
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Mi-Mi Monahan Her mother makes her dinner every night.We sit at the table and say grace with hands pressedlike clenched thighs and I pray they can’t tell my motherdoesn’t believe in god and doesn’t cook. So I eatall the peas off my plate while she complains over the two bites she’s forced to takefor a …
James Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. … My father didn't think it was possible — he thought I'd get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man's definitions, which was quite right.
James Davis May Even on the night my friend died after a long illness— I won’t use the word battle, but the cancer was gone, and then it came back, like some slasher film killer— even on that night, the feral cat, the one that’s white and fluffy and sometimes affectionate, still crossed our driveway, …
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (June 29, 1900–July 31, 1944) Night, when words fade and things come alive. When the destructive analysis of day is done, and all that is truly important becomes whole and sound again. When man reassembles his fragmentary self and grows with the calm of the trees… I longed for night and for …
Eleanor Rand Wilner For years he had been hidden, quiet,huge head on his paws,almost a sphinx in his composure,a figure waitingfor a breeze to move the densegreen canopy of leaves overhead,enough to bring a hair-thin laser lineof light downinto the endless twilightbelow;he had been patient, waitingfor the underbrush to open, for a lowwind to enter, …
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Czesław Miłosz (June 30, 1911 – August 14, 2004) “So lasting they are, the rivers!” Only think. Sources somewhere in the mountains pulsate and springs seep from a rock, join in a stream, in the current of a river, and the river flows through centuries, millennia. Tribes, nations pass, and the river is still there, …
Phillip Lopate It's good we only see each other once a week.A young man about to move in with his fiancéedied of a sudden heart attack at twenty-six.One hears these stories all the time.The heart is trained to handle deprivation,not unforeseen happiness. Just as when youthrow your arms around me I start to overflow,but then …
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Jane Hirshfield (February 24, 1953 -) Metaphors give words a way to go beyond their own meaning. They are handles on the door of what we can know and of what we can imagine. Each door leads to some new house and some new world that only that one handle can open… What’s amazing is …
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Ellen Bass (June 16, 1947 -) I try to look at the big picture. The sun, ardent tonguelicking us like a mother besottedwith her new cub, will wear itself out. Everything is transitory.Think of the meteorthat annihilated the dinosaurs.And before that, the volcanoesof the Permian period — all those burnt fernsand reptiles, sharks and bony fish —that …
Rebecca Solnit (June 24, 1961 -) People are dying. Aquatic animals are baking in their shells. Fruit is being cooked on the tree. It’s time to act… Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, …
Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell (September 29, 1810 – November 12, 1865) Sunday July 4th 1836 I made a vow within my soul, O Child,When thou wert laid beside my weary heart,With marks of death on every tender partThat, if in time a living infant smiled,Winning my ear with gentle sounds of loveIn sunshine of such joy, …
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Ida Bell Wells (July 16, 1862 – March 25, 1931) I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching, and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.
Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer What could be more valuablethan nothing? The nothing thatframes “The Thinker,” the nothingthat holds every bowl,every vase, every bust, every thought.Let others buy the clay, the steel,the papier-mâché. I will be satisfiedwith nothing more than nothing.Nothing pleases me. Nothingenchants me. Nothing,as Heisenberg says,has a weight. Just thinkof the space here beside mewhere …
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Émile Zola (April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902) I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light …
JR Solonche Go out and listen to the frogs, he said.They speak for you. So I went out to listen to the frogsas he said, for he was a poet and spoke with passion and audacious authority.And in the moonlight at the pond, I listened to the frogs speaking to one another,and after a while …
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Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart - Star Trek: The Next Generation) The Prime Directive is not just a set of rules. It is a philosophy, and a very correct one. History has proved again and again that whenever mankind interferes with a less-developed civilization, no matter how well intentioned that interference may be, the results are …
Tracy K Smith (April 16, 1972 -) I wish it would grab me by the ankles and pull.I wish its shadow would dance up close, closing in.When I close my eyes a presence forms, backs away.I float above a lake, am dragged backfrom a portion of sky. Down, down, the falling doesn’t end.Every marked body …
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934–November 17, 1992) As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.
Anya Krugovoy Silver (December 22, 1968 – August 6, 2018) There’s no doubt it’s the most glamorous,the one you reach for first—its luscious gloss.Russian Roulette, First Dance, Apéritif, Cherry Pop.For three days, your nails are a Ferris wheel,a field of roses, a flashing neon Open sign.Whatever you’re wearing feels like a tight dressand your hair …
Charles M Blow (August 11, 1970 -) Black people are targeted by the criminal justice system and that is used to target them by the electoral system. Either way, if you are Black in America, you are a target.
Philip Schultz (January 06, 1945 -) To pay for my father’s funeralI borrowed money from peoplehe already owed money to.One called him a nobody.No, I said, he was a failure.You can’t remembera nobody’s name, that’s whythey’re called nobodies.Failures are unforgettable.The rabbi who read a stock eulogyabout a man who didn’t belong toor believe in anythingwas …
To be “nobody but yourself” — in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else — means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting. e.e. cummings (October 14, 1894 – September 3, 1962) Tao Writer (April I7, 1948 -) After …
Maria Popova (July 28, 1984 -) Here I am, and here you are, and here is the robin’s egg in its near-life collision with chance. To ask for its meaning is as meaningless a question as to demand the meaning of a color or the meaning of a bird. On this particular day, at this …
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Nate Marshall today i offer my selfall the small kindnesses. i’m out herewith breath in my bodythough it may be stank& body in my controlthough it may be too muchor not enough. today i offer the whole criba jam we ain’t heard in a minute& permission to turn the news down& move a hip like …
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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 04, 1975) For love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives, indeed possesses an unequaled power of self-revelation and an unequaled clarity of vision for the disclosure of who, precisely because it is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what the loved …
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) You are the bread and the knife,The crystal goblet and the wine… —Jacques Crickillon You are the bread and the knife,the crystal goblet and the wine.You are the dew on the morning grassand the burning wheel of the sun.You are the white apron of the baker,and the marsh birds …
Roland Barthes (November 12, 1915–March 26, 1980) I decide that (the declaration of love), though I repeat and rehearse it day by day through the course of time, will somehow recover, each time I utter it, a new state. Like the Argonaut renewing his ship during his voyage without changing its name, the subject in …
Ishion Hutchinson In memoriam Adam Zagajewski (June 21, 1945 - March 21, 2021) Cool as the breeze, springcomes and proves the provenblank which was sorrowa turbulent need, a healing.Who am I kidding? To say “spring,”and to say so on the front stepsjust after noon in the bright cool of the day,is a form of dissolution.How …
Alain de Botton (December 20, 1969 -) At its most basic, charity means offering someone something they need but can’t get for themselves. This is normally and logically understood to mean something material. We overwhelmingly associate charity with giving money. But, in its widest sense, charity stretches far beyond financial donations. Charity involves offering someone …
Lisel Mueller (February 8, 1924 – February 21, 2020) We bring our hands togetherin applause, that absurd noise,when we want to be silent. We might as wellbe banging pots and pans,it is that jarring, a violationof the music we've listened towithout moving, almost holding our breath.The pianist in his blindinglywhite summer jacket bowsand disappears and …
Adam Zagajewski (June 21, 1945 – March 21, 2021) Poets must have firm opinions about life and death, but not political opinions: I don’t think that tax reform legislation is any business of poets.
Adam Zagajewski (June 21, 1945 – March 21, 2021) To go to Lvov. Which stationfor Lvov, if not in a dream, at dawn, when dew gleams on a suitcase, when expresstrains and bullet trains are being born. To leave in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September or in March. But only if Lvov exists,if it is …
Romain Rolland (January 29, 1866 – December 30, 1944) The hammer is not all: the anvil also is necessary. Had destiny descended only upon some weakling, or on an imitation great man, and bent his back under this burden, there would have been no tragedy in it, only an everyday affair. But here destiny meets …
John Keats ( October 31, 1795 – February 23, 1821) Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;Conspiring with him how to load and blessWith fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;To swell the gourd, and plump …
Henrik Johan Ibsen (March 20, 1828 – May 23, 1906) I almost think we're all of us Ghosts … It's not only what we have invited from our father and mother that walks in us. It's all sorts of dead ideas, and lifeless old beliefs, and so forth. They have no vitality, but they cling …
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman (November 10, 1960 -) For Arthur Eddington 1.To find the many in the onehe sweated under foreign skiesto see the stars behind the sun.So space and time were now undonereality was undisguised.We found the many in the one.There is no photograph, not one,that shows the mind behind the eyes.He saw the …
Archilochus (680–645 BC) Nothing can be surprising any more or impossible or miraculous, now that Zeus, father of the Olympians has made night out of noonday, hiding the bright sunlight, and . . . fear has come upon mankind. After this, men can believe anything, expect anything...
WS Merwin (September 30, 1927–March 15, 2019) When they start to wear your clothesdo their dreams become more like yourswho do they look likewhen they start to use your languagedo they say what you saywho are they in your wordswhen they start to use your moneydo they need the same things you needor do the …
Sy Montgomery (February 7, 1958 -) What is the soul? Some say it is the self, the “I” that inhabits the body; without the soul, the body is like a lightbulb with no electricity. But it is more than the engine of life, say others; it is what gives life meaning and purpose. Soul is …
Diane di Prima (August 6, 1934 – October 25, 2020) For Jackson Allen My friend wears my scarf at his waistI give him moonstonesHe gives me shell & seaweedsHe comes from a distant city & I meet himWe will plant eggplants & celery togetherHe weaves me cloth …
Deborah Landau So whatever’s the opposite of a Buddhist that’s what I am.Kindhearted, yes, but knee deep in existential gloom,except when the fog smokes the bridges like this—like, instead of being afraid we might juice ourselves up,eh, like, might get kissed again? Dwelling in bones I go straightthrough life, a sublime abundance—cherries, dog’s breath, the …
Jack Kerouac (March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) You think out what actually happened, you tell friends long stories about it, you mull it over in your mind, you connect it together at leisure, then when the time comes to pay the rent again you force yourself to sit at the typewriter, or at …
Many of us do not understand the concept of exponential growth with regards to how quickly things grow and change. The explanation below, in layman terms, is the best I found so far from Jane E Brody, Personal Health columnist for The New York Times. Dr. Slovic, author of “The Perception of Risk,” explained exponential …
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Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) But, who is Death? A figure that harrows and wastes wherever and however it pleases. This is also a possible description of the Countess Bathory. Never did anyone wish so hard not to grow old; I mean, to die. That is why, perhaps, she acted and …
Alejandra Pizarnik (April 29, 1936 – September 25, 1972) Once again, someone falls in their first falling–fall of two bodies, of two eyes, of four green eyes or eight green eyes if we count those born in the mirror (at midnight, in the purest fear, in the loss), you haven’t been able to recognize the …
Keith Allen Haring (May 4, 1958 – February 16, 1990) I don’t think art is propaganda; it should be something that liberates the soul, provokes the imagination and encourages people to go further. It celebrates humanity instead of manipulating it.
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) ‘Tis good — the looking back on Grief —To re-endure a Day —We thought the Mighty Funeral —Of All Conceived Joy —To recollect how Busy GrassDid meddle — one by one —Till all the Grief with Summer — wavedAnd none could see the stone.And though …
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John William Coltrane (September 23, 1926–July 17, 1967) History shows that the innovator is more often than not met with some degree of condemnation; usually according to the degree of his departure from the prevailing modes of expression or what have you. Change is always so hard to accept… Innovators always seek to revitalize, extend …
Dorianne Laux (January 10, 1952 -) On the street outside the windowsomeone is talking to someone else,a baffling song, no words, only the musicof voices—low contralto of questions,laughter’s plucked strings—voices in darknessbelow stars where someone straddles a bikeup on the balls of his feet, and someone elsestands firm on a curb, her arms crossed, twodogs …
Audre Lorde (February 18, 1934 – November 17, 1992) There's always someone asking you to underline one piece of yourself - whether it's Black, woman, mother, dyke, teacher, etc. - because that's the piece that they need to key in to. They want to dismiss everything else.
Thomas Hardy (June 02, 1840 – January 11, 1928) Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to me,But as at first, when our day was fair. Can it be you that I hear? Let …
Barbara Jean Lee (July 16, 1946 -) I was the sole member of Congress to vote against the war in Afghanistan. Congress has yet to stand up against endless militarism On 11 September 2001, the world witnessed a terrible attack against our nation that took thousands of lives and changed millions more lives forever. The …
Ada Limón On the black wet branches of the linden,still clinging to umber leaves of late fall,two crows land. They say, “Stop,” and still I wantto make them into something they are not.Odin’s ravens, the bruja’s eyes. What newsare they bringing of our world to the worldof the gods? It can’t be good. More sufferingall …
Edward Roscoe Murrow (April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.
Aracelis Girmay (December 10, 1977 -) When I get the call about my brother,I'm on a stopped train leaving town& the news packs into me—freight—though it's him on the other endnow, saying finefine— Forfeit my eyes, I want to turn awayfrom the hair on the floor of his house& how it got there Monday,but my …
Henry James (April 15, 1843 – February 28, 1916)A second chance - that is the delusion. There was never to be but one. We work in the dark - we do what we can - we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the …
Robert von Ranke Graves (July 24, 1895 – December 07, 1985) Every choice is always the wrong choice,Every vote cast is always cast away—How can truth hover between alternatives?Then love me more than dearly, love me wholly,Love me with no weighing of circumstance,As I am pledged in honour to love you:With no weakness, with no …
Émile Édouard Charles Antoine Zola (April 02, 1840 – September 29, 1902) I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.
Vanessa Jimenez Gabb There will be workBy late fallRaining inHabana ViejoIt’s so hardTo not think of youPrivacy is complicatedThe famous hotelBy the seaWhere did you come fromWhere did you come fromSometimes the verbsAren't importantThank youFor this organizationThe conspicuous absenceOf logosThese mountains I believeWill absolve meWhen I rememberTo look upMoney doesn't alwaysMean what I thinkIt doesIt …
Francis Bacon (January 22, 1561 – April 09, 1626), also known as Lord Verulam There it is. I don't believe in anything, but I'm always glad to wake up in the morning. It doesn't depress me. I'm never depressed. My basic nervous system is filled with this optimism. It's mad, I know, because it's optimism …
James Harrison (December 11, 1937 – March 26, 2016) Night and dayseize the day, also the night —a handful of water to grasp.The moon shines off the mountainsnow where grizzlies look for a placefor the winter’s sleep and birth.I just ate the year’s last tomatoin the year’s fatal whirl.This is mid-October, apple time.I picked them …
Eckhart Tolle (February 16, 1948 -) Always say “yes” to the present moment. What could be more futile, more insane, than to create inner resistance to what already is? What could be more insane than to oppose life itself, which is now and always now? Surrender to what is. Say “yes” to life — and …
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Margaret Hasse After being a student, then an hourly worker,I became a career girl and earned real money.I left behind a provisional furnished apartmentwith its stained curtains, butt-burned tableand Goodwill mattress I was never sure about. Alone I bought a house with an attic,a basement and a skirt of flowers.Freely I spent on white paint, …
A house that offers sanctuary, that embraces family and friends alike with comfort and warmth, becomes a refuge from the world outside—a truly peaceful home and haven that soothes the senses and refreshes the spirit. — Ann Rooney Heuer I believe this body is my sacred space. Wherever I am, it is a place of refuge …
Clive Staples Lewis (November 29, 1898 – November 22, 1963) Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point …
Mary Jane Olive (September 10, 1935 – January 17, 2019) Who made the world?Who made the swan, and the black bear?Who made the grasshopper?This grasshopper, I mean—the one who has flung herself out of the grass,the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up …
David Whyte (November 02, 1955 -) The poet lives and writes at the frontier between deep internal experience and the revelations of the outer world. There is no going back for the poet once this frontier has been reached; a new territory is visible and what has been said cannot be unsaid. The discipline of …
Franz Xaver Kappus (May 17, 1883 – October 09, 1966) Through my life there trembles, without complaintor sighs, a deep, dark pain.My dreams of pure snowblossomsconsecrate the stillest day.But oft my path encountersthe great question. I become smalland cold, like a lakewhose waters I dare not measure.Then a sorrow overcomes me, a sorrowlike the dullest …
Augustine of Hippo (November 13, 354 – August 28, 430) also known as Saint Augustine Once for all, then, a short precept is given thee: Love, and do what thou wilt: whether thou hold thy peace, through love hold thy peace; whether thou cry out, through love cry out; whether thou correct, through love correct; …
David Wolf Budbill (June 13, 1940 – September 25, 2016) Winter is the best timeto find out who you are.Quiet, contemplation time,away from the rushing world,cold time, dark time, holed-uppulled-in time and spaceto see that inner landscape,that place hidden and within.
Olivia Laing Art is one of the prime ways we have of opening ourselves and going beyond ourselves. That’s what art is, it’s the product of the human being in the world and imagination, all coming together. The irrepressibility of the life in the works, regardless of the times, the histories, the life stories, it’s …
Victoria Chang The Blue Dress—died on August 6, 2015, along with the little blue flowers, all silent. Once the petals looked up. Now small pieces of dust. I wonder whether they burned the dress or just the body? I wonder who lifted her up into the fire? I wonder if her hair brushed his cheek …
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Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913–February 12, 1980) In times of crisis, we summon up our strength.Then, if we are lucky, we are able to call every resource, every forgotten image that can leap to our quickening, every memory that can make us know our power. And this luck is more than it seems to be: …
Billy Collins (March 22, 1941 -) Yesterday, I lay awake in the palm of the night.A soft rain stole in, unhelped by any breeze,And when I saw the silver glaze on the windows,I started with A, with Ackerman, as it happened,Then Baxter and Calabro,Davis and Eberling, names falling into placeAs droplets fell through the dark.Names …
Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (January 29, 1860 – July 15, 1904) My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter two take.
Dawn Lundy Martin They will tell you that I was sick, that I was a drug addict. They will tell you I died a natural death. Sometimes young people just die, they will say, we don’t know why. They will say I was lazy, that I could not work because of disease and just general …
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Benjamin Disraeli (December 21, 1804 – April 19, 1881) In great cities men are brought together by the desire of gain. They are not in a state of co-operation, but of isolation, as to the making of fortunes; and for all the rest they are careless of neighbors. Christia