Only the Heart of the Matter Genuinely Matters

[Image: “Enigma with Key, Ocean Falls, BC,” by user “adavey” (Alan Davey) on Flickr. (Used here under a Creative Commons license; thank you!) From the photographer’s caption there: “Someone must have a quirky sense of humor and enough spare time to do something with it. The key behind the glass is attached to a door. Farther down the door, and not shown here, is a hasp with a padlock. What we don’t know is whether the key opens the padlock. In some places, this installation would be considered art. I’ve seen worse stuff at the Whitney Biennial. Here in the real world, it doesn’t really matter, because at the moment the padlock isn’t locked.”]

From whiskey river:

Nocturne II

August arrives in the dark

we are not even asleep and it is here
with a gust of rain rustling before it
how can it be so late all at once
somewhere the Perseids are falling
toward us already at a speed that would
burn us alive if we could believe it
but in the stillness after the rain ends
nothing is to be heard but the drops falling
one at a time from the tips of the leaves
into the night and I lie in the dark
listening to what I remember
while the night flies on with us into itself

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

What matters is that you allow your heart—not your ego—to rule your life. Then very little matters because you will be a humble person and you’ll take most of life as it comes. If it rains, you get wet; if they don’t show up on time, you wait; if they don’t pay you, you eat less; if they don’t love you, so what, you didn’t come to please them anyway; if they don’t think you’re special, that’s marvelous, it frees you from having to thank them for their compliments. If life doesn’t go the way you want, accept the way it does go, use it as your teacher.

(Stuart Wilde [source])

…and:

The less we cling to one side of reality—betting on either or or, arguing for for or against—the more we can be aware of the exquisite counterpoint of things. Everything matters: how we vote, how we tie our shoelaces, how we respond to the faintest whisper of a thought. And nothing matters, because (look!) it’s already gone. When we understand this, we’re home free.

(Stephen Mitchell [source])

…and:

There are moments when a kind of clarity comes over you, and suddenly you can see through walls to another dimension that you’d forgotten or chosen to ignore in order to continue living with the various illusions that make life, particularly life with other people, possible.

(Nicole Krauss [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Buzzards

Gregarious in hunger, a flock of twenty
turn circles like whorls of barbed wire,
no spot below flown over uncanvassed.

The closer to death the closer they come,
waiting on wings with keen impatient
perseverance, dark blades lying in wake

until age or wound has turned canter
into carcass or near enough for them
to swoop scrupulous in benediction,

land hissing, hopping, tearing, gorging.
no portion, save bone, too durable
to digest. What matters cannot remain.

(Ravi Shankar (not that one) [source])

…and:

What is meant by “reality”? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech—and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates.

(Virginia Woolf [source])

…and:

August 12 in the Nebraska Sand Hills Watching the Perseids Meteor Shower

In the middle of rolling grasslands, away from lights,
a moonless night untethers its wild polka-dots,
the formations we can name competing for attention
in a twinkling and crowded sky-bowl.

Out from the corners, our eyes detect a maverick meteor,
a transient streak, and lying back toward midnight
on the heft of car hood, all conversation blunted,
we are at once unnerved and somehow restored.

Out here, a furrow of spring-fed river threads
through ranches in the tens of thousands of acres.
Like cattle, we are powerless, by instinct can see
why early people trembled and deliberated the heavens.

Off in the distance those cattle make themselves known,
a bird song moves singular across the horizon.
Not yet 2:00, and bits of comet dust, the Perseids,
startle and skim the atmosphere like skipping stones.

In the leaden dark, we are utterly alone. As I rub the ridges
on the back of your hand, our love for all things warm
and pulsing crescendos toward dawn: this timeless awe,
your breath floating with mine upward into the stars.

(Twyla Hansen [source])

…and:

No matter what your scientific background, emotionally you’re an alchemist. You live in a world of liquids, solids, gases and heat-transfer effects that accompany their changes of state. These are the things you perceive, the things you feel. Whatever you know about their true natures is rafted on top of that. So, when it comes to the day-to-day sensations of living, from mixing a cup of coffee to flying a kite, you treat with the four ideal elements of the old philosophers: earth, air, fire, water.

Let’s face it, air isn’t very glamorous, no matter how you look at it. I mean, I’d hate to be without it, but it’s invisible and so long as it behaves itself it can be taken for granted and pretty much ignored. Earth? The trouble with earth is that it endures. Solid objects tend to persist with a monotonous regularity.

Not so fire and water, however. They’re formless, colorful, and they’re always doing something. While suggesting you repent, prophets very seldom predict the wrath of the gods in terms of landslides and hurricanes. No. Floods and fires are what you get for the rottenness of your ways. Primitive man was really on his way when he learned to kindle the one and had enough of the other nearby to put it out. It is coincidence that we’ve filled hells with fires and oceans with monsters? I don’t think so. Both principles are mobile, which is generally a sign of life. Both are mysterious and possess the power to hurt or kill. It is no wonder that intelligent creatures the universe over have reacted to them in a similar fashion. It is the alchemical response.

(Roger Zelazny [source: here and elsewhere])