born at each moment into the everlasting newness

.

My gaze is clear as a sunflower.

My way is to walk the roads

Looking right and left

And sometimes looking behind me...

What I see at each moment

Is that which I never

Caught sight of before.

I have the knack of full awareness

The knack of essential astonishment

That an infant might experience

If at birth he were aware

That he was actually born!

I feel myself born at each moment

Into the everlasting newness

of the world.

I believe in the world

As I believe in a daisy

Because I see it.

But I do not think about it

Because to think is to not-understand.

The world was not made 

For us to think about it

(To think is to have sick vision)

But for us to look at it and assent.

I have no philosophy: I have senses ...

If I talk of nature, that is not because

I know what nature is

But because I love it, and love is for this only:

For he who loves never knows what he loves

Or why he loves, or what love is.

Loving is eternal innocence

And the only innocence is not-thinking.

~ Fernando Pessoa

from The Keeper of the Flocks

translated by Thomas Merton
art by van gogh