Time spent with poets is never wasted.
What can I have that I still want?
I feel like an inadequate machine, a machine that breaks down at crucial moments, grinds to a dreadful hault, ‘won’t go,’ or, even worse, explodes in some innocent person’s face.
Nobody stays special when they’re old, Anna. That’s what we have to learn.
Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive. It is all closed in, to a kind of still, intense waiting. Is this a key? Keep busy with survival. Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember that nothing stays the same for long, not even pain, psychic pain. Sit it out. Let it all pass. Let it go.
There is no doubt that solitude is a challenge and to maintain balance within it a precarious business. But I must not forget that, for me, being with people or even with one beloved person for any length of time without solitude is even worse. I lose my center. I feel dispersed, scattered, in pieces. I must have time alone in which to mull over my encounter, and to extract its juice, its essence, to understand what has really happened to me as a consequence of it.
For a long time now, every meeting with another human being has been a collision. I feel too much, sense too much, am exhausted by the reverberations after even the simplest conversation.
I always forget how important the empty days are, how important it may be sometimes not to expect to produce anything, even a few lines in a journal. A day when one has not pushed oneself to the limit seems a damaged, damaging day, a sinful day. Not so! The most valuable thing one can do for the psyche, occasionally, is to let it rest, wander, live in the changing light of a room.
The reasons for depression are not so interesting as the way one handles it, simply to stay alive.
It is never a waste of time to be outdoors, and never a waste of time to rest, even for a few hours.
We have to break the mirror to be ourselves...
Plants do not speak, but their silence is alive with change.
We fear disturbance, change, fear to bring to light and to talk about what is painful. Suffering often feels like failure, but it is actually the door into growth.
How does one grow up?” I asked a friend the other day. There was a slight pause; then she answered, “By thinking.
I hate small talk with a passionate hatred. Why? I suppose because any meeting with another human being is collision for me now.
Everything in us presses toward decision, even toward the wrong decision, just to be free of the anxiety that precedes any big step in life.
I am here alone for the first time in weeks, to take up my “real” life again at last. That is what is strange – that friends, even passionate love, are not my real life unless there is time alone in which to explore and to discover what is happening or has happened. Without the interruptions, nourishing and maddening, this life would become arid. Yet I taste it fully only when I am alone here and “the house and I resume old conversations”.
Art must be nourished by faith, the faith of an equal.
I know that I myself have felt that prickling of the scalp that Emily Dickinson tells us is the sign of recognition before a true poem.
Must not a poet hunt the unicorn through bush and bramble, through snow and fire, over desert and mountain, through thickets and over long barren roads even though he suspects sometimes that the unicorn does not exist- or exists only in his imagination?