So, let us not be blind to our differences–but let us also direct attention to our common interests and to the means by which those differences can be resolved. And if we cannot end now our differences, at least we can help make the world safe for diversity. For, in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.
JFK’s commencement address at American University, 1963. 11/08/24.
They are not long, the weeping and the laughter,
Love and desire and hate:
I think they have no portion in us after
We pass the gate.
They are not long, the days of wine and roses:
Out of a misty dream
Our path emerges for a while, then closes
Within a dream.
Ernest Dowson. 10/26/24.
In these deep solitudes and awful cells,
Where heav'nly-pensive contemplation dwells,
And ever-musing melancholy reigns;
What means this tumult in a vestal's veins?
Why rove my thoughts beyond this last retreat?
Why feels my heart its long-forgotten heat?
...
How happy is the blameless vestal's lot!
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind!
Each pray'r accepted, and each wish resign'd;
...
Then conscience sleeps, and leaving nature free,
All my loose soul unbounded brings to thee.
Oh curs'd, dear horrors of all-conscious night!
How flowing guilt exalts the keen delight!
...
I hear thee, view thee, gaze o'er all thy charms,
And round thy phantom glue my clasping arms.
I wake—no more I hear, no more I view,
The phantom flies me, as unkind as you.
I call aloud; it hears not what I say;
I stretch my empty arms; it glides away.
Alexander Pope. 9/1/24.
Ah, those days… For many years afterward their hapiness haunted me. Sometimes, listening to music, I drift back and nothing has changed. The long end of summer. Day after day of warm weather, voices calling as night came on and lighted windows pricked the darkness and, at day-break, the murmur of corn and the warm smell of fields ripe for harvest. And being young.
If I’d stayed there, would I always have been happy? No, I suppose not. People move away, grow older, die, and the bright belief that there will be another marvelous thing around each corner fades. It is now or never; we must snatch at happiness as it flies.
From A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr. 7/30/24.
We sail within a vast sphere, ever drifting in uncertainty, driven from end to end. When we think to attach ourselves to any point and to fasten to it, it wavers and leaves us; and if we follow it, it eludes our grasp, slips past us, and vanishes for ever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, and yet most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find solid ground and an ultimate sure foundation whereon to build a tower reaching to the Infinite. But our whole groundwork cracks, and the earth opens to abysses.
Let us therefore not look for certainty and stability. Our reason is always deceived by fickle shadows; nothing can fix the finite between the two Infinites, which both enclose and fly from it.
From “Misery of Man Without God” by Blaise Pascal. 5/21/24.
love is a place
love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds
By e e cummings, from Complete Poems 1904-1962. 4/11/24.
“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace”
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, grant that
I may not so much seek
To be consoled, as to console;
Not so much to be understood as
To understand; not so much to be
Loved as to love:
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning, that we are pardoned;
It is in dying, that we awaken to eternal life.
St. Francis of Assisi (1182-1226). Anonymous translation. 4/11/24.
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry. 4/11/24.
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Mary Oliver. 4/11/24.
O Me! O Life!
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the
foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish
than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I
see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me
intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid
these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here— that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
From Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. 3/19/24.
Splitting an Order
I like to watch an old man cutting a sandwich in half,
maybe an ordinary cold roast beef on whole wheat bread,
no pickles or onion, keeping his shaky hands steady
by placing his forearms firm on the edge of the table
and using both hands, the left to hold the sandwich in place,
and the right to cut it surely, corner to corner,
observing his progress through glasses that moments before
he wiped with his napkin, and then to see him lift half
onto the extra plate that he asked the server to bring,
and then to wait, offering the plate to his wife
while she slowly unrolls her napkin and places her spoon,
her knife, and her fork in their proper places,
then smooths the starched white napkin over her knees
and meets his eyes and holds out both old hands to him.
From Splitting an Order by Ted Kooser. Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 3/1/24.
Sonder (n)
the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.
(Coined in “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows” by John Koenig. 2/26/24.)
One
The mosquito is so small
it takes almost nothing to ruin it.
Each leaf, the same.
And the black ant, hurrying.
So many lives, so many fortunes!
Every morning, I walk softly and with forward glances
down to the ponds and through the pinewoods.
Mushrooms, even, have but a brief hour
before the slug creeps to the feast,
before the pine needles hustle down
under the bundles of harsh, beneficent rain.
How many, how many, how many
make up a world!
And then I think of that old idea: the singular
and the eternal.
One cup, in which everything is swirled
back to the color of the sea and sky.
Imagine it!
A shining cup, surely!
In the moment in which there is no wind
over your shoulder,
you stare down into it,
and there you are,
your own darling face, your own eyes.
And then the wind, not thinking of you, just passes by,
touching the ant, the mosquito, the leaf,
and you know what else!
How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky,
how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you,
even your eyes, even your imagination.
(By Mary Oliver. Sent to me by a dear old friend. 2/25/24.)
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
(From Complete Poems: 1904-1962 by e. e. cummings. 8/15/23.)
Awake at Night
Late in the night I pay
the unrest I owe
to the life that has never lived
and cannot live now.
What the world could be
is my good dream
and my agony when, dreaming it,
I lie awake and turn
and look into the dark.
I think of a luxury
in the sturdiness and grace
of necessary things, not
in frivolity. That would heal
the earth, and heal men.
But the end, too, is part
of the pattern, the last
labor of the heart:
to learn to lie still, one with the earth
again, and let the world go.
(From Farming: A Handbook by Wendell Berry. 5/31/23.)
The Thought of Something Else
1.
A spring wind blowing
the smell of the ground
through of intersections of traffic,
the mind turns, seeks a new
nativity — another place,
simpler, less weighted
by what has already been.
Another place!
it's enough to grieve me —
that old dream of going,
of becoming a better man
just by getting up and going
to a better place.
2.
The mystery. The old
unaccountable unfolding.
The iron trees in the park
suddenly remember forests.
It becomes possible to think of going.
3.
— a place where thought
can take its shape
as quietly in the mind
as water in a pitcher,
or a man can be
safely without thought
— see the day begin
and lean back,
a simple wakefulness filling perfectly
the spaces among the leaves.
(From The Broken Ground by Wendell Berry. 5/31/23.)
Pocket Poem
If this comes creased and creased again and soiled
as if I'd opened it a thousand times
to see if what I'd written here was right,
it's all because I looked too long for you
to put it in your pocket. Midnight says
the little gifts of loneliness come wrapped
by nervous fingers. What I wanted this
to say was that I want to be so close
that when you find it, it is warm from me.
(From Flying at Night: Poems 1965-1985 by Ted Kooser. 5/31/23.)
Thy sea, O God, so great,
My boat so small.
It cannot be that any happy fate
Will me befall
Save as Thy goodness opens paths for me
Through the consuming vastness of the sea.
(From “Breton Fisherman’s Prayer” by Winfred Ernest Garrison. Used here. 2/22/23.)
…for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting — no more — and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth.
(From “On Listening” by Plutarch, in Moralia. Tr. Robin Waterfield.)
In her own sweet world
Populated by dolls and clowns
And a prince and a big purple bear
Lives my favorite girl
Unaware of the worried frowns
That we weary grown-ups all wear
In the sun she dances
To silent music-songs
That are spun of gold
Somewhere in her own little head
Then one day all too soon
She'll grow up & she'll leave her doll
And her prince & her silly old bear
When she goes they will cry
As they whisper good-bye
They will miss her I know
But then so will I
(From “Waltz for Debby,” composed by Bill Evans. Lyrics written by Geene Lees. Version A, B. 7/21/21.)
Il faisait doux, le café m’avait réchauffé et par la porte ouverte entrait une odeur de nuit et de fleurs… C’est un frôlement qui m’a réveillé. D’avoir fermé les yeux, la pièce m’a paru encore plus écltante de blancheur. Devant moi, il n’y avait pas une ombre et chaque objet, chaque angle, toutes les courbes se dessinaient avec une pureté blessante pour les yeux.
(From L’étranger by Albert Camus. 7/20/21.)
The seasons are nature’s clock and calendar, phases to live within and revolve around. I cannot push nor pull them, nor convince them to slow nor hasten. Nature is wildly beautiful and deeply cruel, and no matter how many times I have begged, she has moved without me, changed without me, with no notice. She is neither benevolent nor spiteful, but indifferent. We are a part of all, and she knows.
An eternity’s worth of experience passes in a moment, only to be realized after it is gone. We are enamored and surrounded by our tasks, by the work we create, and then one day nature has changed again….
We promise ourselves that we will notice more and appreciate more next time, before it has gone.
(From “Nature’s Season’s” by Max Morningstar, in Visualizing Nature: Essays on Truth, Spirit, and Philosphy. 5/13/21.)
A Couple
A bee rolls in the yellow rose.
Does she invite his hairy rub?
He scrubs himself in her creamy folds...
When he's done his honey-thieving
at her matrix, whirs free, leaving,
she closes, still tall, chill,
unrumpled on her stem.
(May Swenson, from Buzzwords: Poems About Insects. 5/13/21.)