To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can’t really call being alive.
My work is loving the world.
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention.
And over one more set of hills, along the sea, the last roses have opened their factories of sweetness and are giving it back to the world. If I had another life I would want to spend it all on some unstinting happiness.
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
Every day I see or hear something that more or less kills me with delight, that leaves me like a needle in the haystack of light.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
Look, hasn’t my body already felt like the body of a flower?
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
Attention is the beginning of devotion.
It’s not a competition, it’s a doorway.
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.
There are a hundred paths through the world that are easier than loving. But who wants easier?
I have a notion that if you are going to be spiritually curious, you better not get cluttered up with too many material things.
Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last! What a task to ask of anything, or anyone, yet it is ours, and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.
As a child, what captivated me was reading the poems myself and realizing that there was a world without material substance which was nevertheless as alive as any other.
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.