Enough — David Whyte
Enough. These few words are enough.
If not these words, this breath.
If not this breath, this sitting here.
This opening to the life
We have refused again and again
Until now.
Until now.
Forget about enlightenment — John Welwood
Sit down wherever you are
And listen to the wind singing in your veins.
Feel the love, the longing, the fear in your bones.
Open your heart to who you are, right now,
Not who you would like to be,
Not the saint you are striving to become,
But the being right here before you, inside you, around you.
All of you is holy.
You are already more and less
Than whatever you can know.
Breathe out,
Touch in,
Let go.
Love After Love — Derek Walcott
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
Wild Geese — Mary Oliver
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.
I brought you something — jkkennedywrites
I brought you something,
it’s a permission slip
to feel good about
that decision you made that
may have upset someone else
but kept you intact.
Prescription for the Disillusioned — Rebecca del Rio
Come new to this day.
Remove the rigid
overcoat of experience,
the notion of knowing,
the beliefs that cloud
your vision.
Leave behind the stories
of your life. Spit out the
sour taste of unmet expectation.
Let the stale scent of what-ifs
waft back into the swamp
of your useless fears.
Arrive curious, without the armor
of certainty, the plans and planned
results of the life you’ve imagined.
Live the life that chooses you, new
every breath, every blink of
your astonished eyes.
The Journey — Mary Oliver
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.
And then I kissed my fear — jkkennedy
And then
I kissed my fear
on its crooked mouth
and whispered
farewell old friend,
I’m off to meet
The Odds
and I hear they
may favor me
without you.
She Told Me the Earth Loves Us — Anne Haven McDonnell
She said it softly, without a need
for conviction or romance.
After everything? I asked, ashamed.
That's not the kind of love she meant.
She walked through a field of gray
beetle-pored pine, snags branching
like polished bone. I forget sometimes
how trees look at me with the generosity
of water. I forget all the other
breath I'm breathing in.
Today I learned that trees can't sleep
with our lights on. That they knit
a forest in their language, their feelings.
This is not a metaphor.
Like seeing a face across a crowd,
we are learning all the old things,
newly shined and numbered.
I'm always looking
for a place to lie down
and cry. Green, mossed, shaded.
Or rock-quiet, empty. Somewhere
to hush and start over.
I put on my antlers in the sun.
I walk through the dark gates of the trees.
Grief waters my footsteps, leaving
a trail that glistens.
Sweet Darkness — David Whyte
When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When your vision has gone,
no part of the world can find you.
Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
The dark will be your home
tonight.
The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.
Still Water — W. B. Yeats
We can make our minds so like still water
that beings gather about us,
that they may see, it may be,
their own images,
and so live for a moment
with a clearer, perhaps even with a fiercer life
because of our quiet.
Admit something — Hafiz
Admit something:
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
otherwise, someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
this great pull in us
to connect.
Why not become the one
who lives with a full moon in each eye
that is always saying,
with that sweet moon language,
what every other eye in this world
is dying to hear?
Ithaka — C. P. Cavafy
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn't have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
Monet Refuses the Operation — Lisel Mueller
Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.
How silly and marvelous it is — jkkennedy
How silly and marvelous it is
that I am only ever
one choice away from
something new.
Sometimes on Sunday — jkkennedy
sometimes on sunday
at unusual o’clock,
a dollop of pure wonder
pops forth from the ether
to remind me that
I am, in fact,
alive, relatively well,
and a somewhat
magnificent spec of universe
There’s a bit of bravery — jkkennedy
There’s a bit of bravery
in thinking about
new possibilities, isn’t there?
That’s because
it takes believing.
And sometimes
believing can feel like
such a courageous thing.
Delighted to be caught — jkkennedy
Delighted to be
caught, red handed.
Not only am I
up to something,
I’m up to
everything
these days.
I am in
absolute cahoots
with this life of mine.
“That’s a beautiful little life” — jkkennedy
“That’s a beautiful little life
you have there”.
Thanks, I made it.
It has pockets,
for all my treasures.
If you’ve come to me seeking beautiful things — jkkennedywrites
If you’ve come to me
seeking beautiful things,
you’ll find them…
but they won’t be alone,
there is grief and chaos and
dread here too, you see,
they mingle and eat together
in this heart of mine.
There is something perfectly reckless — jkkennedywrites
There is something
perfectly reckless
about this readiness
I have for
this life that I’m
so hopelessly
unprepared for.