When will you have a little pity for every soft thing that walks through the world, yourself included.
The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.
In this universe we are given two gifts: the ability to love and the ability to question. Which are, at the same time, the fires that warm us and the fires that scorch us.
Music: what so many sentences aspire to be.
My work is the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird – equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums...
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I’ll take grace. I don’t know what it is exactly, but I’ll take it.
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own.
We need beauty because it makes us ache to be worthy of it.
I saw that worrying had come to nothing and gave it up. And took my old body and went out into the morning, and sang.
On poetry: Everyone wants to know what it means. But nobody is asking, How does it feel?
Walks work for me. I enter some arena that is neither conscious or unconscious.
Things take the time they take. don’t worry. How many roads did St. Augustine follow before he became St. Augustine?
If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy, don’t hesitate. Give in to it.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled – to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
Today I am altogether without ambition. Where did I get such wisdom?
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.