Gotta Love It

[Image: “Morning with Chair,” by John E. Simpson.
(Shared here under a Creative Commons License;
for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river (italicized portion):

In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be. Wordsworth studied himself and found the subject astonishing. Actually what he studied was his relationship to the harmonies and also the discords of the natural world. That’s what created the excitement.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

14. Even if you’re going to live three thousand more years, or ten times that, remember: you cannot lose another life than the one you’re living now, or live another one than the one you’re losing. The longest amounts to the same as the shortest. The present is the same for everyone; its loss is the same for everyone, and it should be clear that a brief instant is all that is lost. For you can’t lose either the past or the future; how could you lose what you don’t have?

(Marcus Aurelius [source])

…and:

The Spring Flowers Own
(excerpt)

This unfinished business of my
childhood
this emerald lake
from my journey’s other
side
haunts hierarchies of heavens

a palm forest
fell overnight
to make room for an unwanted
garden
ever since
fevers and swellings
turn me into a river

(Etel Adnan [source])

Not from whiskey river:

One tree is like another tree, but not too much. One tulip is like the next tulip, but not altogether. More or less like people—a general outline, then the stunning individual strokes. Hello Tom, hello Andy. Hello Archibald Violet, and Clarissa Bluebell. Hello Lilian Willow, and Noah, the oak tree. I have hugged and kissed every first day of spring for the last thirty years. And in reply its thousands of leaves tremble! What a life is ours! Doesn’t anybody in the world anymore want to get up in the

middle of the night and
sing?

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

(Walt Whitman [source])

…and:

I Ask My Mother to Sing

She begins, and my grandmother joins her.
Mother and daughter sing like young girls.
If my father were alive, he would play
his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace,
nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch
the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers
running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and:

As the University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman argues, happiness can be learned, just as helplessness can. He’s founded an institute for “positive psychology” and the formal study of happiness. Finding the bright side, favoring positive explanations, choosing enjoyable tasks, cultivating optimism and hope, pursuing happiness—are among the transformative skills to practice. “Anyone can be sad when they’re sad,” my mother used to say. “The trick is to be happy when you’re sad!”… So she loved [my book] Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden, with its bedrock urge to forget winning or losing, just cultivate delight. I finished that book one summer, while in a collar with a broken neck, anxious about an operation that might leave me paralyzed. Yet each day I rose happy, rubbed my mental hands together, and said, “Oh, boy, what can I learn today?” It was one of the happiest writing experiences of my life, full of nature study, surprise, mystery, and marvel. Wonder is a bulky emotion. When it fills your heart there isn’t room for anything else.

(Diane Ackerman [source])