Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.
Evening came, a paw, to the gray hut by the river.
Readers should not be loaded with more information and guidance than a lively mind needs – puzzlement can be accepted, but insulting clarity is fatal to a poem.
Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn’t music.
I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.
You don’t need many words if you already know what you’re talking about.
Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.
I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.
You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are comings and goings from miles away that hold the stillness exactly before us. What the river says, that is what I say.
There is no such thing as writer’s block for writers whose standards are low enough.
The things you do not have to say make you rich. Saying the things you do not have to say weakens your talk. Hearing the things you do not have to hear dulls your hearing. And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.
Security of character would be like a compass, you know? Other people may say that this way is north, or this way might be north. But the compass just says – north. That’s what we count on.
Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.
I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don’t have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along.
Once you decide to do right, life is easy, there are no distractions.
Let the bucket of memory down into the well, bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one stirring, no plans. Just being there.
Everyone is born a poet – a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?
The more you let yourself be distracted from where you are going, the more you are the person that you are. It’s not so much like getting lost as it is like getting found.