How to Make the Trip from Unsatisfactory Here, to Vaguely-OK There, While Living with All the Godawful Stuff en Route

[Image: “Dry Summer (Until It Wasn’t,” by John E. Simpson. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo is among those in the “#oneoffs#” album at my SmugMug site.]

From whiskey river (all but the last sentence):

I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.The temptation towards resolution, towards wrapping up the package, seems to me a terrible trap. Why not be more honest with the moment? The most authentic endings are the ones which are already revolving towards another beginning. That’s genius. Somebody told me once that fugue means to flee, so that Bach’s melody lines are like he’s running away.

(Sam Shepard [source])

…and:

You go on by doing the best you can. You go on by being generous. You go on by being true. You go on by offering comfort to others who can’t go on. You go on by allowing the unbearable days to pass and allowing the pleasure in other days. You go on by finding a channel for your love and another for your rage.

(Cheryl Strayed [source (#24)])

…and:

The narrator is well aware of how regrettable is his inability to record at this point something of a really spectacular order—some heroic feat, or memorable deed like those that thrill us in the chronicles of the past. The truth is that nothing is less sensational than pestilence and by reason of their very duration. Great misfortunes are monotonous. In the memories of those who lived through them, the grim days of plague do not stand out like vivid flames, ravenous and inextinguishable, beaconing a troubled sky, but rather like the slow, deliberate progress of some monstrous thing crushing out all upon its path.

(Albert Camus [source])

Not from whiskey river:

Poem for a New Year

Glinting shards of dropped branch-ice
litter the white ground under the maples,

each glassy fragment containing
its unique memory of tree,
that, as the day warms, thins and spreads

into a gleaming tangle of light,
a crazed mirror held up to the future.

Hope isn’t anyone’s to give.
It has to be found.
And I come out here to find it,

to take each moment as it comes.
A kind of borrowing.

A lone mourning dove arrives
in the smoky-blue sky of its feathers,
and lands, slender as a cupped hand,

among the seeds scattered on the stone walkway,
its faint tracks in the snow-dust—briefly mine.

(Patty Crane [source])

…and:

Counting, New Year’s Morning, What Powers Yet Remain To Me

The world asks, as it asks daily:
And what can you make, can you do, to change my deep-broken, fractured?

I count, this first day of another year, what remains.
I have a mountain, a kitchen, two hands.

Can admire with two eyes the mountain,
actual, recalcitrant, shifting its pebbles, sheltering foxes and beetles.

Can make black-eyed peas and collards.
Can make, from last year’s late-ripening persimmons, a pudding.

Can climb a stepladder, change the bulb in a track light.

For four years, I woke each day first to the mountain,
then to the question.

The feet of the new sufferings followed the feet of the old,
and still they surprised.

I brought salt, brought oil, to the question. Brought sweet tea,
brought postcards and stamps. For four years, each day, something.

Stone did not become apple. War did not become peace.
Yet joy still stays joy. Sequins stay sequins. Words still bespangle, bewilder.

Today, I woke without answer.

The day answers, unpockets a thought from a friend—

don’t despair of this falling world, not yet 
didn’t it give you the asking

(Jane Hirshfield [source])

…and:

Only the walker who sets out toward ultimate things is a pilgrim. In this lies the terrible difference between tourist and pilgrim. The tourist travels just as far, sometimes with great zeal and courage, gathering up acquisitions (a string of adventures, a wondrous tale or two) and returns the same person as the one who departed. There is something inexpressibly sad in the clutter of belongings the tourist unpacks back at home.

The pilgrim is different. The pilgrim resolves that the one who returns will not be the same person as the one who set out. Pilgrimage is a passage for the reckless and subtle. The pilgrim — and the metaphor comes to us from distant times — must be prepared to shed the husk of personality or even the body like a worn out coat… For the pilgrim the road is home; reaching your destination seems nearly inconsequential.

(Andrew Schelling [source])