I would do this for Fran every year. So this might be the last. We'll see.
Bashō’s Ghost — Sam Hamill
There are two dominate phenomena in a decent school: 1) somewhere amidst the chaos, there is order; and 2) one never comprehends its meaning until long after it is over. Like a museum, a school is necessary, but a terrible place to learn.
“Please Mr. Beckett, just comment on receiving the Nobel Prize.”
“Every word,” Sam Beckett replied, “is an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.”
Traveling, one is always vulnerable. I remember something Octavio Paz had written about Bashō: “To travel is not ‘to die a little,’ but to practice the art of saying goodbye so that, our burden that much lighter, we may learn to receive. Detachments are apprenticeships.
Mecca — Susan Straight
People die of broken hearts. It’s an actual medical condition
Her grandmother said if you find one small piece of beauty every day you would live.
Brown Dog — Jim Harrison
The power of love to make you feel awful is something to see.
It rarely is, but it can be a blessed event when a dream dies.
Injustice spread around him like an elephant fart.
Of late she had been profoundly sunken in what she perceived as the accidental nature of life.
The rule was to run to the forest at the sign of any ambition.
The Half Known Life — Pico Iyer
On a deeper level, however, it’s everything half known, from love to faith to wonder and terror, that determines the course of our lives.
Everywhere, I met battered souls wondering how much they could afford to put the sorrows of the past behind them.
Paradise could seem the cruelest notion of all if it meant pretending that the real world didn’t exist.
The human is a tiny thing on an encompassing canvas.
Real life can offer us pleasures that fantasy leaves out.
Winter — Ali Smith
The slightest human exchange is complex in the extreme.
Then again, why underestimate, ever, the mind of a child.
Well, now I know that your sixties feel the same as all the other ages, and your seventies. You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.
We’re all apocrypha.
The Path of Flowering Thorn
The Life and Poetry of Yosa Buson — Makoto Ueda
the willow is bare
the clear stream has dried, and stones
lie scattered here and there
… , a basic attitude toward haikai that he was later to formulate into the idea of “detachment from the mundane.”
that pool in the river
known to allure humans
over there in the fog?
thinner and thinner
the moon grows, then is gone—
colder the night
Likewise shiori, which was derived from the verb shioru (to wither), implied a feeling of sadness or pity which had transcended itself by merging with calm acceptance of fate.
winter trees—
the moonbeams tonight
penetrate the bones Kito
The God Argument
The Case Against Religion and for Humanism — A.C. Grayling
To put it bluntly: suppose you were asked to choose between keeping the Sistine Chapel ceiling or saving the lives of those burned to death at the stake by the Inquisition. What would you say?
The deists who felt disquiet about this should have taken their disquiet seriously, because explaining something by something unexplained amounts, obviously, to no explanation at all.
; one mark of intelligence is an ability to live with as yet unanswered questions.
It’s hard to imagine how societies would get by without hypocrisy.
In short, the existence of hopes for and belief in an afterlife constitutes a very sad reflection on the harsh facts for the majority of mankind in this life.
Sierra Crossing
First Roads to California — Thomas Frederick Howard
They did not forget the informant who directed them there and gave the stream his name, which they understood to be Truckee.
Character — Ralph Waldo Emerson
They do not wish to be lovely, but to be loved.
If I quake, what matters it what I quake at?
and, if we are capable of fear, will readily find terrors.
Life goes headlong. We chase some flying scheme, or we are hunted by some fear or command behind us. But if suddenly we encounter a friend, we pause; our heat and hurry look foolish enough; now pause, now possession is required, and the power to swell the moment from the resources of the heart. The moment is all, in all noble relations.
Collected Poems — Gary Snyder
Mountain and Rivers Without End
Danger On Peaks
This Present Moment
Uncollected Poems
What we ate—who ate what—
how we all prevailed.
~~~~~~~~~~~
“well man I just don’t feel right
without something on my back”
~~~~~~~~~~~
& four thousand years of using writing equals
the life of a bristlecone pine—
~~~~~~~~~~~
Walking on walking
under foot earth turns
~~~~~~~~~~~~
O, ah! The
awareness of emptiness
brings forth a heart of compassion!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
If you ask for help it comes
But not in any way you’d ever know
~~~~~~~~~~
How
small birds flit
from bough
to bough to bough
to bough to bough to bough
~~~~~~~~~~~
Nap on a granite slab
half in shade, you can never hear enough
sound of wind in the pines
~~~~~~~~~
a certain poet, needling
Allen Ginsberg by the campfire
“How come they all love you?”
~~~~~~~~~~
Things spread out
rolling and unrolling, packing and unpacking,
—this painful impermanent world.
~~~~~~~~~~
—I wrote back,
Ah yes… impermanence. But this is
never a reason to let compassion and focus slide, or to pass off
the sufferings of others because they are merely impermanent
beings. Issa’s haiku goes,
Tsuyu no yo wa tsuyu no ya nagara sarinagara
“This dewdrop world
is but a dewdrop world
and yet—“
That “and yet” is our perennial practice. And
Maybe the root of the Dharma.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Askesis, Praxis, Theôria of the Wild
The shining way of the wild
—its theôria
is, that the world is unrelenting, brief, and often painful
and its askesis,
cold, hunger, stupid mistakes, bitterness, delusions, loneliness,
hard nights and days are unavoidable
to find the praxis is to
hang in, work it out, watch for the moment,
coiled and gazing, the shining way of the wild
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This present moment
that lives on
to become
long ago
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Far, far, the living and the dead
and the light years—cut apart.
Her spirit already dissolving,
not even entering dreams.
Heaven lasts, Earth endures,
— and both will end;
This sorrow stretches on
forever, without limit. Bai Juyi
Wanderlust
A History of Walking — Rebecca Solnit
…, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking.
Walking is one way of maintaining a bulwark against erosion of the mind, the body, the landscape, and the city, and every walker is a guard on patrol to protect the ineffable.
To hear about walking from people whose only claim on our attention is to have walked far is like getting one’s advice on food from peoples whose only credentials come from winning a pie-eating contest.
In small doses melancholy, alienation, and introspection are among life’s most refined pleasures.
The Classic Tradition Of Haiku — Edited by Faubion Bowers
passing through the world
indeed this is just
a shelter from the shower — Sōgi
Life
Is like a butterfly
Whatever it is. — Saikaku
but for their voices
the herons would disappear —
this morning’s snow — Chiyo
clear water is cool
fireflies vanish —
there’s nothing more — Chiyo
I sleep … I wake …
How wide
The bed with none beside. — Chiyo
Ours is a world of suffering,
Even if cheery-flowers bloom. — Issa
The world of dew
Is a world of dew, and yet
And yet … — Issa
Snopes
The Hamlet — William Faulkner
Only thank God men have done learned how to forget quick what they ain’t brave enough to try to cure, he told himself, walking on.
, and he was boiling with that helpless rage at abstract circumstance which feeds on its own impotence, has no object to retaliate upon; it seemed to him that once more he had been victim of a useless and elaborate practical joke at the hands of the prime maniacal Risibility, the sole purpose of which had been to leave him with a mile’s walk in darkness.
He fled, not from his past, but to escape his future.
When you’re unlucky, it don’t matter much what you do.
A History of Haiku
Volume One
Chapter XIII
Chapter XX — R.H. Blyth
No small birds
Pass through
These deep woods. — Kana-jo
An autumn eve;
Along this road
Goes no one.
A world of short-lived dew,
And in that dew-drop,—
What violent quarrels!
Without you in truth,
Too many and too wide
Are the groves.
The distant mountains
Are reflected in the pupils
Of the dragonfly. — Issa
The Colossus of Maroussi — Henry Miller
To keep the mind empty is a feat, a very healthful feat too.
We don’t need the truth as it is dished up to us in the daily papers. We need peace and solitude and idleness.
At Eleusis one realizes, if never before, that there is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy.
I know now that any influence I may have upon the world will be a result of the example I set and not because of my words.
The Revolt Against Humanity — Adam Kirsch
In the Anthropocene, nature becomes a reflection of humanity for the first time.
How can we escape from ourselves by contemplating a world we have so comprehensively defaced?
Yet the fact is that we already do know humanity is going to disappear. This is perhaps the most important modern discovery, the one that condemns us to live in a different spiritual world from all our ancestors.
As long as we exist in human bodies, time and space will defeat our will and imagination, which are limitless.
Elizebeth Finch — Julian Barnes
And artifice, as she also observed, was not incompatible with truth.
Also, as a general rule, beware of what most people aspire to.
Passion may mislead us furiously.
Clearly untrue; though has anyone never told a lie in matters of love and sex?
The Noise of Time — Julian Barnes
But an idyll, by definition, only becomes an idyll once it has ended.
Sometimes, he thought that there was a different version of everything.
Because it is always possible to bring the living to a lower point. You cannot say that of the dead.
It was life he was afraid of, not death.
Integrity is like virginity: once lost, never recoverable.
The Villain
A Portrait of Don Whillans — Jim Perrin
To get through by dint of our own efforts is why we choose to climb. When other reasons intrude — prestige, money, competition — the pure motive is clouded, the clear view lost, and danger can approach unseen, as witnessed by the corpses that litter the South Col and summit slopes of Chomolungma.
— that places we choose to explore acts as an objective correlative to our own states of mind.
“Why do you drink so much Don?” “I’ve got a morbid fear of dehydration, Richard.”
Camp 4
Recollections of a Yosemite Rockclimber — Steve Roper
Rockclimbers might side with Muir: “the tide of visitors will float slowly about the bottom of the valley as harmless scum collecting in hotel and saloon eddies, leaving the the rocks and falls eloquent as ever…”
As Denali, Mount Rainer, and the Grand Canyon dominate and define their respective national parks, so does El Capitan loom, tower, and rule over the entrance to Yosemite Valley.
If you pushed into the unknown, then perhaps you’d discover something about yourself.
Robbins poked fun at himself, beginning an article: “Some people are bothered by thoughts of decay and death. Not me. Rather, I am obsessed.”
The Lives of a Cell — Lewis Thomas
I find myself surprised by the thought that dying is an all-right thing to do, but perhaps it should not surprise. It is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions, with it mechanisms worked out with the same attention to detail, the same provision for the advantage of the organism, the same abundance of genetic information for the guidance through the stages, that we have long sense become accustomed to finding in all the crucial acts of living.
It is a source of satisfaction to be part of the improvement of the species.
It is a natural marvel. All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring.
We will have to give up the notion that death is a catastrophe, or detestable, or avoidable, or even strange.
We need all the fallibility we can get.
The Transcendent Brain — Alan Lightman
Our inescapable death may be the single most powerful fact of our brief existence in this strange cosmos where we find ourselves.
Emergence or emergentism is collective behavior of a complex system with many parts that is not apparent and often not predictable by understanding the individual parts.
The Theory & Practice of Rivers — Jim Harrison
The days are stacked against
what we think we are.
Where The Sea Used To Be — Rick Bass
.. , and that it was only in the compression of things—the moment—that there appeared to be any significant flutter of individuality.
He understood how such perceptions would lead one to shun, even fear, the future. Whatever peace or beauty existed in the moment would always be at risk—either attenuated, drawn out into nothingness by the future’s assimilation, or compressed into the past, all massed into one forgotten gray block.
How sometimes desire can make you weak, instead strong?
How strange it seemed to succeed at a thing by turning away from it rather than hurling one’s self at it.
The Beige Dolorosa — Jim Harrison
We catch ourselves frozen and stuttering in incertitude.
There are strange things afoot in the universe.
Many of us shrink from life, thinking that this in itself might offer us some protection.
If there is anything worse than self-consciousness, I don’t know what it is.
Uniqueness is another illusion of personality.
Poet Warrior — Joy Harjo
You are looking for words to sustain you, to counter despair.
I do not want to forget, though sometimes memory appears to be an enemy bringing only pain.
When I fail to trust what my deepest knowing tells me, then I suffer.
I didn’t feel much like an artist in those days, yet art is what sustained my spirit when I felt emptied and overwhelmed.
There is no story, No told them, without the hard parts
What a wild dilemma,
how to make it to the stars on a highway slick with fear.
Blue Skies — T.C. Boyle
There was a sadness to life that everybody had to deal with in one way or another, the inevitable sense of loss that crept up on you at the strangest times.
, but you’d have to believe in God for that sort of blame to accrue and she didn’t believe in God, only the random shuffle of events, like this one unfolding right here and now.
How reduced the world had become.
Nature bites back.
Driving on the Rim — Thomas McGuane
Isn’t that real friendship, to tell someone your fears?
Expecting divine retribution and not getting it seemed to undercut their faith.
His medical world view, which I inherited, was that it is unreasonable to expect everyone to get better, much less survive, and great cruelty can be involved in unreasonably prolonging life.
…, because episodes of the most incredibly opaque motivation have punctuated my life.
Human entanglement was so tiresome that if we were of sound ego, we would find it exhilarating to arouse disgust in others.
I don’t think anyone has quite understood the merciless power of women at their apogee.
First We Read, Then We Write
Emerson on the Creative Process — Robert D. Richardson
“Fight best in the shade of the cloud of arrows.” RWE
He would read your poem or your novel, but not your opinion of someone else’s poem or novel, let alone your opinion of someone else’s opinion.
For answers to the question of how to live, you must turn, not to the gods, not to history, not to the state or family, but to nature.
“The world is emblematic. Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of the human mind.” RWE
One cannot repeat it enough; art is not the finished work, art is the getting there.
A Book Of Luminous Things — Edited by Czeslaw Milosz
A Women Meets An Old Lover
‘He with whom I ran hand in hand
kicking the leathery leaves down Oak Hill Path
thirty years ago
appeared before me with anxious face, pale,
almost unrecognized, hesitant
lame.
He whom I cannot remember hearing laugh out loud
but see in mind’s eye smiling, self-approving,
wept on my shoulder.
He who seemed always
to take and not give, who took me
so long to forget,
remembered everything I had so long forgotten.’ Denise Levertov
Auto Mirror
In the rear-view mirror suddenly
I saw the bulk of the Beauvais Cathedral;
great things dwell in small ones
for a moment. Adam Zagajewski
Goddesses — Joseph Campbell
This is the basic point in mythology: that the individual is performing an act not out of his own impulse, but in accord with the order of the universe.
Turn inward, and there you will find the footprints of the mystery of being.
This is the essential idea of Amor, experiencing the pain. The essence of of life is pain. All life is suffering.
Beauty and Sadness — Yasunari Kawabata
“I wonder what the retirement age is in the novel business.”
“The day you die.”
Loneliness seemed to come and go as it pleased.
One day while writing a letter Otoko happened to open the dictionary to the character for “think.” As she scanned its other meanings (“yearn for,” “be unable to forget,” “be sad”) she felt her chest tighten.
Innumerable words reminded her of him. To link whatever she saw and heard with her love was nothing less than to be alive.
Time passed. But time flows in many streams. Like a river, an inner stream of time will flow rapidly at some places and sluggishly at others, or perhaps even stand hopelessly stagnant. Cosmic time is the same for everyone, but human time differs with each person.
Encounters with the Archdruid — John McPhee
“All a conservation group can do is to defer something. There’s no such thing as a permanent victory. After we win a battle, the wilderness is still there, and still vulnerable. When a conservation group loses a battle, the wilderness is dead.” Brower
“You haven’t got anything one day with a bulldozer won’t cure.” Charlie Fraser
Dancing with the Dead — Red Pine
Before long, I realized the path to Enlightenment made more sense than a PhD.
so many fantasies rise in vain — Stonehouse
Lying in the mountains
pine wind through the ears
for no good reason
beautiful dreams are blown apart — Stonehouse
106 For Attendant Li Dan
There’s not much excitement in a country town
I went to see spring in Guangling
the fading flowers still welcomed my visit
and no one asked who was in my heart — Wei Yingwu
I keep recalling our autumn goodbyes
the wine in this cup doesn’t work
diluted by so many cares — Wei Yingwu
my concerns however are other than these
namely how to beat white hair and disappearing years — Liu Zongyaun
ten thousand autumns from now
who will know of my glory or shame
I only regret while I was alive
I didn’t get more wine — Tao Yuanming
The Largesse of the Sea Maiden — Dennis Johnson
You repent the things you’ve done, and regret the chances you let get away.
I note that I’ve lived long in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to.
“poking around in her stool for my broken heart.”
a lethal champ of mediocrity.
..and who was I to argue about things like reincarnation. My own treatment of the matter went no farther than to pray it was a fiction, this single current addled existence of mine being vastly more than enough.
Three Roads Back
How Emerson, Thoreau, and William James Responded to the Greatest Losses of Their Lives
Robert D. Richardson
(Emerson) .. would later say, of Thomas Carlyle: “his imagination, finding no nutriment in any creation, avenged itself by celebrating the majestic beauty of decay.”
Individuals die; nature lives on. This is easy to say, but if it is really meant—lived, felt—it is thrilling.
“Yet death is beautiful when seen to be a law, and not an accident—it is as common as life…” Thoreau
The very process of decay is a life process.
Her (Minny Temple) rule of life was believing in “the remote possibility of the best things being better than a clear certainty of the second best.”
Everybody’s Fool — Richard Russo
On the other hand, life was full of mysteries, none more perplexing than human nature itself.
Because he knew from personal experience that the world was rational until it wasn’t, after which all bets were off. When, without warning, the world pivoted, it became in that instant unrecognizable.
Idiocy, after the fact, resisted precision.
Doctor Jazz — Hayden Curruth
Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
Yes, the human emotional
mechanism in all its gut-eating horridness
cannot be denied.
In spite of your Buddhist
proclivities, when you imagine bliss
you still must struggle to get there.
He knew, everyone must know that beauty
Is always, always, accompanied by pain.
Bashō, you made
a living writing haiku?
Wow! Way to go, man.
Six Walks
In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau — Ben Shattuck
But grief generates more than you started with, I’ve since learned.
In bad luck there is luck.
Maybe what I want when I go out in nature is not to see it, but to be seen by it.
Manners — Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lovers should guard their strangeness.
Our American institutions have been friendly to her, and at this moment I esteem it a chief felicity of this country, that it excels in women.
Somebody’s Fool — Richard Russo
Not having answers was the sort of thing a man might be forgiven for, whereas not even being able to formulate the right question suggested a degree of obliviousness for which there might well be no remedy.
The world was a place where signals that might have saved you never made it through the noise.
‘Do some fucking thing. If it doesn’t work, do something else.’
Almost every situation could be made worse, even when it wasn’t immediately clear how.
The look on his face suggested that he was coming to terms—and not for the first time—with a sad eternal truth: that nothing in this life ever come to you clean.
This Old Life — Donald Hall
“A man who touches a cabbage is seldom sorry.”
I gave up bobby-soxed
girls I loved who kicked from white skirts
for poems that outshone
like the sun my nympholept moonshine.
An Unfortunate Woman
A Journal — Richard Brautigan
It would be convenient if one could redesign the past, change a few things here and there, like certain acts of stupidity, but if one could do that, the past would always be in motion. It would never settle down finally to days of solid marble.
, and I find myself occupying sleepless nights, wondering how I lost control of the heart’s basic events again.
Midnights — Alec Wilkinson
Fear is always there. You just have to learn to live with it, because if you lose that edge you’ll get hurt, sooner or later.
Another Turn of the Crank — Wendell Berry
We can’t go on much longer, maybe, without considering the likelihood that we humans are not intelligent enough to work on the scale to which we have been tempted by our technological abilities.
If, as is often the case already, nobody can be elected who is not wealthy, and if nobody can be wealthy without dependence on the corporate economy, than what is your vote worth? The citizen thus becomes an economic subject.
It is well understood that nothing so excites the glands of a free-market capitalist as the offer of a government subsidy.
If we want to become “stickers,” even if we merely want to live, we cannot exempt use from care.
Obata’s Yosemite
The Art and Letters of Chiura Obata
from His Trip to the High Sierra in 1927 — Chiura Obata
The speed of the universe is surprisingly fast.
From the skies it seems to come roaring and thundering down, the Yosemite Falls. Its sounds echos and re-echos back and forth from the high mountains in the front, vibrating throughout Yosemite Vally with its marvelous and stupendous music. Upon the tops of the walls of a massive rock, which stands perpendicular beside the fall, are thrown the last brilliant rays of the setting sun.
Snowy mountain road,
Pine needles scattered by the storm.
California to the west, Nevada to the east.
Even the wind freezes on Tioga Pass.
The Contract Surgeon — Dan O’Brien
I have always known there is a stronger medicine than mine. For any man to think otherwise is a dangerous act of hubris.
Like all religion it is nonsense, except that it often works.
Almost Paradise — Sam Hamill
it would be good to give one’s life to the beautiful
if the beautiful would last. But the world
casts us out and it is impossible to touch anything
except one another. So we reach out when we can.
Rats seek the rice bowl.
I’ve spent a lifetime getting
a little out of
line, content with solitude,
half a recluse, a throwback.
Nothing Quite So Cold
as a winter night alone,
talking with the dead
The Passenger — Cormac McCarthy
What the Squire has never understood is that forgiveness has a time line. While it’s never too late for revenge.
If there is no higher power than I’m it.
You think that when there’s something that’s got you snakebit you can just walk off and forget it. The truth is it aint even following you. It’s waitin for you. It always will be.
Grief is the stuff of life.
Because beauty has power to call forth a grief that is beyond the reach of other tragedies. The loss of a great beauty can bring an entire nation to its knees.
What I found that surprised me was that the unbalanced enjoy a certain largess of personal freedom increasingly abridged in the workaday world.
A calamity can be erased by no amount of good. It can only be erased by a worse calamity.
Halfway To Hollywood
Diaries 1980-1988 — Michael Palin
All technological advances bring built-in dissatisfaction.
All confirms my my feelings that it’s the differences between human beings themselves which account for all our economic, social, and political injustices and not the other way around. In short, there are plenty of shits in the world…
Have been dipping into V Woolf’s extraordinary diaries over the last few days and found a neat phrase — to ‘rout the drowse.’
I think he’d (JC) rather be a philosopher — if only it paid better.
Stella Maris — Cormac McCarthy
The more naive your life the more frightening your dreams.
, but like care everywhere it can never keep up with the need.
There’s data in the world available only to those who have reached a certain level of wretchedness.
Its general vacuity aside there seems to be a ceiling to well-being. My guess is that you can only be so happy. While there seems to be no floor to sorrow.
I think if there were anything to care it would have cared by now.
When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy?
Love is quite possibly a mental disorder itself.
The Double Axe — Robinson Jeffers
Time hangs heavy and lonesome when there is nobody:
The human race is bound to defile,
I’ve often noticed it,
Whatever they can reach or name, they’d shit on the
morning star
If they could reach it.
I believe that beauty and nothing
else is what things are formed for. Certainly
the world
Was not constructed for happiness nor love nor wisdom.
No, nor pain, hatred and folly. All these
Have their seasons; and in the long year they balance
each other, they cancel out. But the beauty stands.
The Accidental Life — Terry McDonell
Fishing for many, is an indispensable connection to earth and life, and it matters little that the multitude that practices it is incapable of translating its ambiguities to another idiom. — Thomas McGuane
One way of measuring a life—maybe as good a method as any other—is on the basis of how much peculiarity you have helped generate. — Charles Gaines
but change was always good if you could adapt.
The Singularities — John Banville
Everything lapses, in the long run.
Godley has shown that just by speculating about it in certain specialized ways we are steadily wearing out the world.
Mortal life is a plague of tiny, uncountable discomfitures, don’t you find?
Few things more laughable than an old man’s lust.
The world has its secret concordances, not all of them accidental.
Off To The Side A Memoir — Jim Harrison
Poetry can evoke the basics.
Old Poets — Donald Hall
; there are no scales on which to balance the wretchedness of human beings against the accomplishments of works of art.
At the end of the lives of the poets, the domestic life is a desert of anguish—perhaps on account of choices made for the sake of the self and its passions and its poetry, choices that in the retrospect of old age appear destructive, cruel, and narcissistic. For some poets—possibly for most poets; possibly for most people—life’s hell is a self-inflicted wound.
Mind the Gap — John Hay
At times, I suppose, I thought of human civilization as an overwhelming artifact prone to periods of decline and degradation.
Poetry was not to be separated from the art and intensity of life itself.
(I might have added, resurrection does not cost that much to maintain.)
The Asking — Jane Hirshfield
AUTUMN
Again the wind
flakes gold-leaf from the trees
and the painting darkens—
as if a thousand penitents
kissed an icon
till it thinned
back to bare wood,
without diminishment.
~~~~~~~~~~
So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.
Tool Use in Animals
For a long time it was thought
the birds were warning: Panther! Panther!
Then someone understood. The birds were scavengers.
The cry was, “Human! Human!”
Writings — James Madison
Pride ignorance Poverty and Luxury among the Priesthood and Vice and Wickedness among the Laity. This is bad enough But It is not the worst I have to tell you.
Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize every expanded prospect.
Dear California
The Golden State in Diaries and Letters — Edited by David Kipen
1929
The book has the charm of your earlier ones, I think; and if anyone dares to say that it has peaks and valleys: all the better, so have the alps. — Robinson Jeffers, to Edna St. Vincent Millay
1991
LAST HOUSE, GLEN ELLEN, CALIFORNIA
Transcendental is the word. I don’t believe in all this stuff about grief because I think we grieve forever, but that goes for love too, fortunately for us all.
Love, M.F.K. Fischer, to Lawrence Clark Powell
1884
When cooked all night, a mule head is a delicacy. Charles Preuss
1944
I don’t know if you realize it, but this is the country Robinson Jeffers writes about. He lives in Carmel, but I gather he has walked and ridden all over this mysterious region. I met him one day. A very strange person—almost like a wounded animal—or a victim of shell shock…
Henry Miller to Anais Nin
1869
If the aching, breaking and broken hearts were weighed in the same scale with the gold, the gold would fly up light as air, while the hearts would weigh down! down!! Jennie Carter
1871
Mr RW Emerson
I invite you [to] join me in a months worship with Nature in the high temples of the great Sierra Crown beyond our holy Yosemite It will cost you nothing save the time & very little of that for you will be mostly in Eternity…
With most cordial regards I am yours in Nature John Muir
1879
MONTEREY, CALIFORNIA
It is the history or our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters, multiplying, spreading, making one happy through another and bringing forth benefits, some thirty, some fifty, some a thousandfold, I should be tempted to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit…
Robert Louis Stevenson
Into The World’s Great Heart — Edna St. Vincent Millay
No man could ever fill my life to the exclusion of other things.
E. St. V. M.
Hair which she still devoutly trusts is red.
Colorless eyes, employing
A childish wonder
To which they have no statistic
Title.
A large mouth,
Lascivious,
Aceticized by blasphemies.
A long throat,
Which will someday
Be strangled.
Thin arms,
In the summer-time leopard
With freckles.
A small body,
Unexclamatory,
But which,
Were it the fashion to wear no clothes,
Would be as well-dressed
As any.
The absurdities of life are not without their little compensations.
For surely, one must be either undiscerning, or frightened, to love only one person, when the world is so full of gracious & noble spirits.
Of course, you have no possible way of knowing how very reticent a person I am, since I am far too reticent ever to have told you.
I’ve Been Thinking — Daniel C. Dennett
What is it like to be a vulture?… say, eagerly climbing into the abdominal cavity of a long-dead elephant to retrieve some morsel?
It is not all that hard to tell when somebody is inventing answers to questions that had never occurred to them.
(centuries-old bullshit is still bullshit)
My impertinent hunch is that if you know a member of the clergy who is indefatigable in pastoral care and good works, you know someone who no longer believes the creed and is atoning for this spiritual failing. Those clergy who still believe are those out playing golf.
Red Stilts — Ted Kooser
At Dusk, In December
Driving a gravel road in the country
I saw a hawk fly up out of a ditch
with a mouse in its beak, and it flew
along beside my car for a minute,
the mouse still alive, its little legs
running as fast as they could, and there
we were, the three of us, all going
in the same direction, west, at just
a little under forty miles per hour.
Last Car Over The Sagamore Bridge — Peter Orner
Try throwing your weight around in a dream and see where it gets you.
Ten Windows — Jane Hirshfield
What a writer or painter undertakes in each work of art is an experiment whose hoped-for outcome is an expanded knowing.
For an artist, everything interests, instructs, is put to use.
These three haiku, placed near one another at the start of Basho’s journey, have the effect of reminding the reader, and perhaps the poet, that all things vanish, sometimes tragically, sometimes ridiculously.
Mundane life goes on, it swallows even the most extraordinary individual disaster
Braided Creek
A Conversation in Poetry — Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison
In New York
on a wet
and bitter street
I heard a crow from home.
Getting older I’m much better at watching
rain. I skip counting individual drops
in favor of the general feeling of rain.
Every time I had a sea change
I thought I was dying.
I probably was.
Stars from horizon to horizon.
A whole half universe
just to light the path.
God And The Folly Of Faith — Victor J. Stegner
At the current stage of scientific development, we can confidently say that no empirical or theoretical basis exists for assuming anything other than that we inhabit a universe made entirely of matter (and energy into which matter can be transformed, and vice versa).
None of the life sciences has ever found any difference in composition between living and nonliving matter. A living cell is made of the same quarks and electrons as a rock.
Nevertheless, a kind of free will can be conceived since our individual decisions are still based on the experiences of a lifetime, which are uniquely our own.
The Ink Dark Moon
Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu
Women of the Ancient Court of Japan — Translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani
Although there is
not one moment
without longing,
still, how strange
this autumn twilight is.
How invisibly
it changes color
in this world,
the flower
of the human heart. — Ono no Komachi
On a night
when the moon
shines as brightly as this,
the unspoken thoughts
of even the most discreet heart might be seen.
Come quickly—as soon as
these blossoms open,
they fall.
This world exists
as a sheen of dew on flowers.
Do you not know
this world
is a waking dream?
However much I once needed you,
that is also a fleeting thing . . . — Izumi Shikibu
The Road Home — Jim Harrison
What in the fuck is love that hollows the chest thusly, and makes the brain stutter?
You can’t change a goddamned thing starting a minute ago.
We don’t get much training in how to die but then what could be more ordinary?
I Forgot To Go To Spain — Jim Harrison
Maybe parents should protect their children from poetry not pornography.
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