Friend, I am becoming desperate. What shall I do? How quickly, if I only knew by what remedy, I would turn from the commotion of my own life. While on and on an on, the sparrow sings.
This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it – to look around and love the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
And whoever thinks these are worthy, breathy words I am writing down is kind. Writing is neither vibrant life nor docile artifact but a text that would put all its money on the hope of suggestion. Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.
If it is... not just one’s own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world – that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise – then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.
Imagination is better than a sharp instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don’t write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn’t mean they don’t know, in their own way, what they are. That they don’t know they are alive – that they don’t feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.
Rumi said, There is no proof of the soul. But isn’t the return of spring and how it springs up in our hearts a pretty good hint?
Oh, feed me this day, Holy Spirit, with the fragrance of the fields and the freshness of the oceans which you have made, and help me to hear and to hold in all dearness those exacting and wonderful words of our Lord Christ Jesus, saying: Follow me.
I know a lot of fancy words. I tear them from my heart and my tongue. Then I pray.
THE DISTINCTION and particular value of anything, or any person, inevitably must alter according to the time and place from which we take our view.
In creative work – creative work of all kinds – those who are the world’s working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.
Try to find the right place for yourself. If you can’t find it, at least dream of it.
What is your heart doing now? “Remembering. Remembering!
I am burdened with anxiety. Anxiety for the lamb with his bitter future, anxiety for my own body, and, not least, anxiety for my own soul. You can fool a lot of yourself but you can’t fool the soul. That worrier.
Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances – a passion for work.
I, too, have been forced to stand close to it, and have felt the almost muscular agony of impotence before it, unable to interfere or assuage or do anything effective. Though I do – oh yes I do – believe the soul is improvable. Oh sweet and defiant hope! 5.
It is supposed that a writer writes what he knows about and knows well. It is not necessarily so. A writer’s subject may just as well, if not more likely, be what the writer longs for and dreams about, in an unquenchable dream, in lush detail and harsh honesty.
I read my books with diligence, and mounting skill, and gathering certainty. I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life.
Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields – and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.
Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.