I would like to believe when I die that I have given myself away like a tree that sows seed every spring and never counts the loss, because it is not loss, it is adding to future life. It is the tree’s way of being. Strongly rooted perhaps, but spilling out its treasure on the wind.
Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.
Fire is a good companion for the mind...
The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind.
It is, I assume, quite easy to wither into old age, and hard to grow into it.
Words are more powerful than perhaps anyone suspects, and once deeply engraved in a child’s mind, they are not easily eradicated.
The most valuable thing we can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of room, not try to be or do anything whatever.
Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation.
Now I become myself. It’s taken time, many years and places.
It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it – and I do and always have – then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.
When one’s not writing poems – and I’m not at the moment – you wonder how you ever did it. It’s like another country you can’t reach.
Fighting dragons is my holy joy.
Where joy in an old pencil is not absurd.
Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
Where music thundered let the mind be still, Where the will triumphed let there be no will, What light revealed, now let the dark fulfill.
Anyone who is going to be a writer knows enough at fifteen to write several novels.
True feeling justifies whatever it may cost.
What is destructive is impatience, haste, expecting too much too fast.
It is dark now. The snow is deep blue and the ocean nearly black. It is time for some music.
We are able to laugh when we achieve detachment, if only for a moment.