not all

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink

Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;

Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink

And rise and sink and rise and sink again;

Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,

Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;

Yet many a man is making friends with death

Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

It well may be that in a difficult hour,

Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,

Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,

I might be driven to sell your love for peace,

Or trade the memory of this night for food.

It well may be. I do not think I would.

~  Edna St. Vincent Millay

The Family Garden

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Tell me again about your garden
           Tell me how you planted, in the small
                      flat of mountain land, corn seed

and bean seed, how your finger poked the soil
           then you dropped in three dark bean seeds
                      for every yellow seed of corn.

Trees and mountains collared your land,
           but the fenced garden opened freely
                      to sun and warm summer rains.

Your potato rows bulged in July. You ached
           from digging them up, your hands down in dirt,
                      the cool lump of a tuber, brown-spotted,

just recovered, a greeting, like shaking hands.
           Baskets full of bumpy brown potatoes filled
                      your basement until fall, until you gave

away what you could, throwing out the rest.
           You gave away honey from the white hive too,
                      that box of bees beside the garden,

honey stored in Mason jars, a clearest honey
           nectar from lin tree blossoms and wild flowers.
                      The bright taste of honey on the tongue

spoke of the place, if a place can be known
           by the activity of bees and a flavor in the mouth,
                      if a person can be known by small acts

such as these, such as the way you rocked
           summer evenings from a chair on the porch
                      tending your inner garden, eyes closed.

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~ Hank Hudepohl

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Our lives are not as limited as we think they are; 

the world is a wonderfully weird place;

 consensual reality is significantly flawed; 

no institution can be trusted, 

but love does work; 

all things are possible; 

and we all could be happy and fulfilled

 if we only had the guts to be truly free

 and the wisdom to shrink our egos 

and quit taking ourselves so damn seriously.

 

 

 

— Tom Robbins

 

 

 

To walk inside yourself

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To walk inside yourself and and meet no one for hours -
that is what you must be able to attain.
To be solitary as you were when you were a child,
when the grown-ups walked around
involved with matters that seemed large and important
because they looked so busy
and because you didn't understand a thing
about what they were doing.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke

He'd loved always his reasons for climbing trees

.

...

And so, he thought, he would need to climb

the tree itself.  He'd climbed trees many times

in play when he was a boy, and many times 

since, when he'd a reason.  He'd loved

always his reasons for climbing trees.

But he'd come now to the age of remembering, 

and he remembered his boyhood fall from an apple tree,

and being brought in to his mother, his wits

dispersed, not knowing where he was,

though where he was was this world still.

If that should happen now, he thought, 

the world he waked up in would not be this one.

The other world is nearer to him now.

But trailing his rope untied as yet to anything

but himself, he climbed up once again and stood 

where only birds and the wind had been before,

and knew it was another world, after all,

that he had climbed up into.  There are

no worlds but other world: the world

of the field mouse, the world of the hawk, 

the world of the beetle, the world of the oak,

the worlds of the unborn, the dead, and all

the heavenly host, and he is alive

in those worlds while living in his own.

Known or unknown, every world exists 

because the others do.

.

The treetops

are another world, smelling of bark,

a stratum of freer air and larger views,

from which he saw the world he'd lived in

all day until now, its intimate geography changed

by his absence and by the height he saw it from.

The sky was a little larger, and all around

the aerial topography of treetops, green and gray,

the ground almost invisible beneath.

He perched there, ungravitied as a bird,

knotting his rope and looking about, worlded

in worlds on worlds, pleased, and unafraid.

.

There are no worlds but other worlds

and all the other worlds are here,

reached or almost reachable by the same

outstretching hand, as he, perched upon 

his high branch, almost imagined flight.

...

~ Wendell Berry, from: 'A Timbered Choir'
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unstable as water

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They were as unstable as water, and like water would perhaps finally prevail.  Since the dawn of life, in successive waves they had been dashing themselves against the coast of flesh.  Each wave was broken, but, like the sea, wore away ever so little of the granite on which it failed, and some day, ages yet, might roll unchecked over the place where the material world had been, and God would move upon the face of those waters.  One such wave (and not the least) I raised and rolled before the branch of an idea, till it reached its crest, and toppled over and fell at Damascus.  The wash of that wave, thrown back by the resistance of vested things, will provide the matter of the following wave, when in fullness of time the sea shall be raised once more.

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~ T. E. Lawrence, from: 'The Seven Pillars of Wisdom'

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In order to arrive

In order to arrive there,

To arrive where you are,

To get from where you are not,

You must go by a way

Wherein there is no ecstasy.

In order to arrive at what you do not know

You must go by a way

Which is the way of ignorance.

In order to possess what you do not possess

You must go by the way

Of dispossession.

In order to arrive at what you are not

You must go through the way

In which you are not.

And what you do not know

Is the only thing you know

And what you own is what you do not own

And where you are is where you are not.

~  T.S. Eliot

one body and one mind

I am 52 years old, and have spent
truly the better part
of my life out-of-doors
but yesterday I heard a new sound above my head
a rustling, ruffling quietness in the spring air

and when I turned my face upward
I saw a flock of blackbirds
rounding a curve I didn't know was there
and the sound was simply all those wings
just feathers against air, against gravity
and such a beautiful winning
the whole flock taking a long, wide turn
as if of one body and one mind.

How do they do that?

Oh if we lived only in human society
with its cruelty and fear
its apathy and exhaustion
what a puny existence that would be

but instead we live and move and have our being
here, in this curving and soaring world
so that when, every now and then, mercy and tenderness triumph in our lives
and when, even more rarely, we manage to unite and move together
toward a common good,

and can think to ourselves:

ah yes, this is how it's meant to be.

~  Julie Cadwallader Staub

A day comes

.

A day comes
when the mouth grows tired
of saying, "I."
Yet it is occupied
still by a self which must speak.
Which still desires,
is curious.
Which believes it has also a right.
What to do?
The tongue consults with the teeth
it knows will survive
both mouth and self,
which grin - it is their natural pose-
and say nothing.

~  Jane Hirshfield

when we say goodbye

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Why, when we say goodbye
at the end of an evening, do we deny
we are saying it at all, as in We'll
be seeing you, or I'll call, or Stop in,
somebody's always at home? Meanwhile, our friends,
telling us the same things, go on disappearing
beyond the porch light into the space
which except for a moment here or there
is always between us, no matter what we do.
Waving goodbye, of course, is what happens
when the space gets too large
for words – a gesture so innocent
and lonely, it could make a person weep
for days. Think of the hundreds of unknown
voyagers in the old, fluttering newsreel
patting and stroking the growing distance
between their nameless ship and the port
they are leaving, as if to promise I'll always
remember, and just as urgently, Always
remember me. It is loneliness, too,
that makes the neighbor down the road lift
two fingers up from his steering wheel as he passes
day after day on his way to work in the hello
that turns into goodbye? What can our own raised
fingers to for him, locked in his masculine
purposes and speeding away inside the glass?
How can our waving wipe away the reflex
so deep in the woman next door to smile
and wave on her way into her house with the mail,
we'll never know if she is happy
or sad or lost? It can't. Yet in that moment
before she and all the others and we ourselves
turn back to our disparate lives, how
extraordinary it is that we make this small flag
with our hands to show the closeness we wish for
in spite of what pulls us apart again
and again: the porch light snapping off,
the car picking its way down the road through the dark.
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~ Wesley McNair
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Large Red Man Reading

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There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,

As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.

They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,

Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.

They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,

.

That would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frost

And cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leaves

And against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly

.

And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,

The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:

Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,

.

Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,

Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they are

And spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked.

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~  Wallace Stevens

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The Stolen Child

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Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we’ve hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he’s going,
The solemn-eyed:
He’ll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than he can understand.

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~ William Butler Yeats

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Listen to your life

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Listen to your life. 

See it for the fathomless mystery that it is.

 In the boredom and the pain of it 

no less than the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, 

smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it

 because in the last analysis all moments are key moments,

 and life itself is grace.

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~  Frederick Buechner

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A ruin is never simply empty

A ruin is never simply empty.  It remains a vivid temple of absence.  All other inhabited dwellings hold their memory and their presence is continually added to and deepened by succeeding generations.  It is, consequently, quite poignant that a long since vacated ruin still retain echoes of the presence of the vanished ones.  The German poet Friedrich Holderlin captures this unstated yet perennial presence of the echo of touch in abandoned places:

When night is like day

And over slow footpaths,

 Dense with golden dreams,

 Lulling breezes drift.

The abandoned place is dense with the presence of the absent ones who have walked there.

~ John O'Donohue, from: 'Eternal Echoes'

do by not doing

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Act by not acting;
do by not doing.
Enjoy the plain and simple.
Find that greatness in the small.
Take care of difficult problems
while they are still easy;
Do easy things before they become too hard.
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~  Tao Teh Ching

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