here is peace

 

 

 

 

It is a sort of tradition in this country not to talk about religion 

for fear of offending — I am still a little subject to the tradition,

 and rather dislike stating my “attitudes” except in the course of a poem.

 However, they are simple. I believe that the universe is one being,

 all its parts are different expressions of the same energy, 

and they are all in communication with each other, 

influencing each other, therefore parts of one organic whole.

 (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.)

The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars, 

none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. 

This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be 

so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, 

and to think of it as divine. It seems to me that this whole alone

 is worthy of the deeper sort of love; and that here is peace, 

freedom, I might say a kind of salvation.

I think that one may contribute (ever so slightly) to the beauty of things

 by making one’s own life and environment beautiful, so far as one’s power reaches.

 This includes moral beauty, one of the qualities of humanity, 

though it seems not to appear elsewhere in the universe. 

But I would have each person realize that his contribution is not important,

 its success not really a matter for exultation nor its failure for mourning;

 the beauty of things is sufficient without him.

 

 

 

 

~ Robinson Jeffers

from  The Wild God of the World: An Anthology of Robinson Jeffers

 with thanks to Brain Pickings

The tides are in our veins, we still mirror the stars,
life is your child, but there is in me
Older and harder than life and more impartial, the eye
that watched before there was an ocean.

~  "Continent’s End” in Tamar and Other Poems