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

 

 

 

the answer

Then what is the answer?—Not to be deluded by dreams. 

To know the great civilizations have broken down into violence, 

and their tyrants come, many times before. 

When open violence appears, to avoid it with honor or choose 

the least ugly faction; these evils are essential. 

To keep one’s own integrity, be merciful and uncorrupted and not 

wish for evil; and not be duped 

By dreams of universal justice or happiness. These dreams will 

not be fulfilled. 

To know this, and know that however ugly the parts appear 

the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand 

Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and 

his history...for contemplation or in fact... 

Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, 

the greatest beauty is 

Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, 

the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man 

Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions, 

or drown in despair when his days darken.

~ Robinson Jeffers

with thanks to http://themarkonthewall.blogspot.com/

carmel point

The extraordinary patience of things!
This beautiful place defaced with a crop of suburban houses -
How beautiful when we first beheld it,
Unbroken field of poppy and lupin walled with clean cliffs;
No intrusion but two or three horses pasturing,
Or a few milch cows rubbing their flanks on the outcrop rockheads -
Now the spoiler has come: does it care?
Not faintly, It has all time, It knows the people are a tide
That swells and in time will ebb, and all
Their works dissolve.  Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff. - As for us:
We must uncenter our minds from ourselves;
We must unhumanize our views a little, and become confident 
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.






~ Robinson Jeffers
art by Gordon Mortensen

Animals

.

At dawn a knot of sea-lions lies off the shore
In the slow swell between the rock and the cliff,
Sharp flippers lifted, or great-eyed heads, as they roll in the sea,
Bigger than draft-horses, and barking like dogs
Their all-night song. It makes me wonder a little
That life near kin to human, intelligent, hot-blooded, idle and 
     singing, can float at ease
In the ice-cold midwinter water. Then, yellow dawn
Colors the south, I think about the rapid and furious lives
     in the sun :
They have little to do with ours; they have nothing to do with
     oxygen and salted water ; they would look monstrous
If we could see them : the beautiful passionate bodies of living
    flame, batlike flapping and screaming,
Tortured with burning lust and acute awareness, that ride the
     storm-tides
Of the great fire-globe. They are animals, as we are. There are
     many other chemistries of animal life
Besides the slow oxidation of carbohydrates and amino-acids.
.
~ Robinson Jeffers