When “Never Enough” and “Ever Plenty” Go Walking Hand-in-Hand

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[Image: “Sufficient Unto the Day…,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (first three stanzas):

Snow Geese

Oh, to love what is lovely, and will not last!
What a task
to ask

of anything, or anyone,

yet it is ours,
and not by the century or the year, but by the hours.

One fall day I heard
above me, and above the sting of the wind, a sound
I did not know, and my look shot upward; it was

a flock of snow geese, winging it
faster than the ones we usually see,
and, being the color of snow, catching the sun

so they were, in part at least, golden. I

held my breath
as we do
sometimes
to stop time
when something wonderful
has touched us

as with a match,
which is lit, and bright,
but does not hurt
in the common way,

but delightfully,
as if delight
were the most serious thing
you ever felt.

The geese
flew on,
I have never
seen them again.

Maybe I will, someday, somewhere.
Maybe I won’t.
It doesn’t matter.
What matters
is that, when I saw them,
I saw them
as through the veil, secretly, joyfully, clearly.

(Mary Oliver [source])

…and:

Actually, love is something entirely different. Just like intelligence is a quality of the mind, so love is a quality of the heart. We don’t just have intelligence when we have to solve a difficult mathematical equation; we don’t just have intelligence when we have to make logical connections; the mind remains intelligent whether we do that or not. It’s the same with love. The loving quality of the heart remains with us whether there’s anybody in front of us that we can actually extend that love to or not.

(Ayya Khema [source])

…and:

Sin

The worst part is failing to kiss the ground each morning.
Or the cold pot of resentment stirred and simmered
well into the evening. Everything else comes from this, grows.

It wouldn’t be so bad if such immense portions
of good fortune weren’t squandered each hour,
minutes the long dead would ransom eternity to regain.

Even now, ripe apples lie rotting casually about the floor,
single bites taken from each – there is
no worm, no snake . . .

only this failure to praise.

(Dane Cervine [source])

…and:

Lightenings

i

Shifting brilliancies. Then winter light
In a doorway, and on the stone doorstep
A beggar shivering in silhouette.

So the particular judgement might be set:
Bare wallstead and a cold hearth rained into—
Bright puddle where the soul-free cloud-life roams.

And after the commanded journey, what?
Nothing magnificent, nothing unknown.
A gazing out from far away, alone.

And it is not particular at all,
Just old truth dawning: there is no next-time-round.
Unroofed scope. Knowledge-freshening wind.

(Seamus Heaney [source])

From elsewhere:

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

(Brad Aaron Modlin [source])

…and:

[The TV series Ted Lasso]’s out-of-the-gate conceit is that a protagonist inhabiting the stereotype of the blissful fool is wiser than the rest of us and has more to teach than to learn.

Ted Lasso began streaming in 2020, when, my Times colleague Margaret Renkl astutely observed, we were all “mired in an America we no longer recognized, a nation so dangerously polarized that many people would think nothing of cutting off their closest family members if they didn’t vote the ‘right’ way.” And the show struck a nerve, Renkl added, because there was “something about Ted Lasso’s sunny optimism and faith in silliness as a social lubricant, something about his openness and his unshakable kindness, that lifted Americans’ pandemic-worn hearts.” Renkl recalled a particular scene in which Ted tells a player who is stewing over a defeat which animal is the happiest in the world: “A goldfish. It’s got a ten-second memory.”

(Frank Bruni [source])

…and:

Lightenings

viii

The annals say: when the monks of Clonmacnoise
Were all at prayers inside the oratory
A ship appeared above them in the air.

The anchor dragged along behind so deep
It hooked itself into the altar rails
And then, as the big hull rocked to a standstill,

A crewman shinned and grappled down the rope
And struggled to release it. But in vain.
‘This man can’t bear our life here and will drown,’

The abbot said, ‘unless we help him.’ So
They did, the freed ship sailed, and the man climbed back
Out of the marvellous as he had known it.

(Seamus Haney [source])

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Stunned by the View from the Edge of the Known

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[Image: “Map of Nowhere,” by Grayson Perry. Per the museum’s description card where I saw this work: “Map of Nowhere takes inspiration from the Ebstorf map, a hand-painted thirteenth-century mappa mundi (world map) from northern Germany. The Ebstorf map depicted the world centered on Jerusalem and encircled by the head, hands, and feet of Jesus Christ. In his version, Grayson Perry has created a wry commentary on both modern life and the mappa mundi genre by replacing Christ with his own self-portrait. Filling Perry’s orb, the center of which is an ‘island of doubt,’ are highly detailed depictions of buildings, plant and animal life, and anatomy with contemporary labels such as ‘“’lifestyle guru,’ ‘Starbucks,’ and ‘Shopaholic.'” For a better, enlargeable view of the etching, and Perry’s own extensive commentary, see here — it’s worth it!]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Landscape Mode

Overlooking the Cumberland River,
Clarksville, Tennessee,
early November 1996

In ancient Chinese paintings we see more sky than
earth, so when clouds hurry by in silver-gray
inkbursts of rolling readiness right along the river,

ripe with rain, rushing the road of time along,
pushing back light, belittling the black and white clarity
of Hollywood in its prime, the eye climbs down to greet

with shining gusto trees along the shore, Opryland
beyond the frame, the blue horizon hidden in a sea
of possibilities. And beyond this there’s jazz: Jimmy Giuffre’s

“Train on the River” stretched out strong like a pet cat
—and that’s that. But not quite. This poem paints
poorly what sketchers and colorists do best. The rest

should come out empty, allowing you to fill in your own
basic emptiness, your openness, your self-portrait
forged and cataloged; on quiet exhibit, on temporary loan.

Descended from clouds immensely more ancient than China,
you never quite becoming the background, the field in a sky
whose subtle earthiness sails over our heads altogether.

(Al Young [source])

…and:

When you consider something like death, after which (there being no news flash to the contrary) we may well go out like a candle flame, then it probably doesn’t matter if we try too hard, are awkward sometimes, care for one another too deeply, are excessively curious about nature, are too open to experience, enjoy a nonstop expense of the senses in an effort to know life intimately and lovingly. It probably doesn’t matter if, while trying to be modest and eager watchers of life’s many spectacles, we sometimes look clumsy or get dirty or ask stupid questions or reveal our ignorance or say the wrong thing or light up with wonder like the children we all are. It probably doesn’t matter if a neighbor, fetching her mail, sees us standing in the cold with our own letters in one hand and a seismically red autumn leaf in the other, its color hitting our senses like a blow from a stun gun, as we stand with a huge grin, too paralyzed by the intricately veined gaudiness of the leaf to move.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

…and:

We generally give to our ideas about the unknown the color of our notions about what we do know: If we call death a sleep it’s because it has the appearance of sleep; if we call death a new life, it’s because it seems different from life. We build our beliefs and hopes out of these small misunderstandings with reality and live off husks of bread we call cakes, the way poor children play at being happy.

But that’s how all life is; at least that’s how the particular way of life generally known as civilization is. Civilization consists in giving an inappropriate name to something and then dreaming what results from that. And in fact the false name and the true dream do create a new reality. The object really does become other, because we have made it so. We manufacture realities. We use the raw materials we always used but the form lent it by art effectively prevents it from remaining the same. A table made out of pinewood is a pinetree but it is also a table. We sit down at the table not at the pinetree.

(Fernando Pessoa [source])

From elsewhere:

I have no ideas before I write a play. I have them when I have written the play or while I am not writing at all. I believe that artistic creation is spontaneous. It certainly is so for me… Fantasy is revealing; it is a method of cognition; everything that is imagined is true; nothing is true if it is not imagined.

(Eugene Ionesco [source])

…and:

When you think about it, for sheer bulk there’s more art done with Crayolas than with anything else. There must be billions of sheets of paper in every country in the world, in billions of boxes and closets and attics and cupboards, covered with billions of pictures in crayon. The imagination of the human race poured out like a river in high and lowe paces. Even presidents and prime ministers and generals all used Crayolas sometime in their lives.

Maybe we should develop a Crayola bomb as our next secret weapon. A happiness weapon. A Beauty Bomb. And every time a crisis developed, we would launch one. It would explode high in the air—explode softly—and send thousands, millions, of little parachutes into the air. Floating down to earth—boxes of Crayolas. And we wouldn’t go cheap, either—not little boxes of eight. Boxes of sixty-four, with the sharpener built right in. With silver and gold and copper, magenta and peach and lime, amber and umber and all the rest. And people would smile and get a little funny look on their faces and cover the world with imagination instead of death. A child who touched one wouldn’t have his hand blown off.

(Robert Fulghum [source])

…and:

The Conversation

Fireflies, Col. Glenn calls them—
banging the capsule’s wall to prove
their movement. This
will be the gesture Hollywood

claims as history—how space
dazzles even the seasoned airman,
maddens like Titania’s touch.
The movie version sees

what he sees: Florida yawn, Delta yawp,
a sunrise inside every hour,
lightning over the Indian Ocean.
Yet the operatic soundtrack, paced

in gilded silence, is not what he hears.
Wonder-ese is not the language
he speaks. For this,
we turn to the transcript. Pilot

to Cap Com; Cap Com to Pilot.
This is Friendship 7, going to manual.
Ah, Roger, Friendship 7.
Pilot, Texas Cap Com, Cape Canaveral.

Cap Coms chiming in from Canary,
Canton, Hawaii, Zanzibar, India,
Woomera: every visual check
on the gyros, inverter temp,

every correction to pitch and yaw,
fuel, oxygen, Ah, Roger, Ah, Over.
Say again your instructions please.
Over. Do you read? Standby.

You can be honest. This
is Godspeed-less, workaday chatter.
This is not what you’d save if
the National Archives were in flames.

You’d grab those proclamations.
You would cart the Magna.
You’d roll up the Constitution
like a favorite dorm-room Van Gogh,

and run. But I’ve got this one.
Because in these pages
my grandfather lives forever—
a Navy captain charged

with Glenn’s vitals, stretching
his stethoscope across 162 miles
and 18 tracking stations.
I hear him in each pressure check.

I see him biting his lip,
leaning toward a bank of dials
while the retropackage breaks, burns.
No one knows if the heat shield

will hold. Captain Pruett
goes unnamed. This
is how history claims us:
not in the gesture of one but

in the conversation of many,
the talk that gets the job done.
We climb into the syrup-can capsule
to circle the Earth three times.

The miraculous swarm, we realize,
is condensation. The light
will wink at us,
flake and ice of our own breath.

(Sandra Beasley [source])

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Truth Now, Truth Then, Truth Later, Truth Never

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[Image: “What Might Lie Ahead” (for lack of a better title). I pulled this from the Bing AI image generator to illustrate a temporary, end-of-2024 pause in my weekly Substack posts of chapters of a novel-in-progress. It doesn’t represent anything which happens in the novel; indeed, since it was AI-generated, no matter how realistic the image seems, we might say it doesn’t represent anything at all.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

So don’t ask yourself what people want. Ask instead, What is true? What really inspires me, excites me? What will really help people and take away their confusion and suffering? It’s sort of a funny, crazy way to go, but I think it’s the only way to bring water to the wasteland Joseph Campbell described. When I read something truthful, something real, I breathe a deep sigh and say, “Fantastic — I wasn’t mad or alone in thinking that, after all!” So often we are left to our own devices, struggling in the dark with this external and internal propaganda system. At that point, for someone to tell us the truth is a gift. In a world where people all around us are lying and confusing us, to be honest is a great kindness.

(David Edwards [source])

…and (italicized paragraph):

It was some years ago that my wife and I and our friends first began to catch on to these roads. We took them once in a while for variety or for a shortcut to another main highway, and each time the scenery was grand and we left the road with a feeling of relaxation and enjoyment. We did this time after time before realizing what should have been obvious: these roads are truly different from the main ones. The whole pace of life and personality of the people who live along them are different. They’re not going anywhere.

I’ve wondered why it took us so long to catch on. We saw it and yet we didn’t see it. Or rather we were trained not to see it. Conned, perhaps, into thinking that the real action was metropolitan and all this was just boring hinterland. It was a puzzling thing. The truth knocks on the door and you say, “Go away, I’m looking for the truth,” and so it goes away. Puzzling.

(Robert M. Pirsig [source])

From elsewhere:

James Kimmel Jr., a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine and the founder and codirector of the Yale Collaborative for Motive Control Studies, sees [the anger so many feel on Election Day] as a kind of drug. “I’ve been researching the way grievances affect the brain,” he wrote in Politico in 2020, “and it turns out that your brain on grievance looks a lot like your brain on drugs. In fact, brain imaging studies show that harboring a grievance (a perceived wrong or injustice, real or imagined) activates the same neural reward circuitry as narcotics.”

He added that what your brain wants to do with that grievance—how it both extends the high and brings it to its most satisfying conclusion—is retaliate. “To be clear,” he wrote, “the retaliation doesn’t need to be physically violent—an unkind word, or tweet, can also be very gratifying.” So can making sure a political opponent is quashed. Your brain on grievance is a gift to the party and the candidate you support.

(Frank Bruni [source])

…and:

Bluestockings

Oh lovely girl, once a mischief hound with me
when we twentied through school
as boy-brained, romping word-flingers
who gabbed the telephone wires thin,
studied, craved, shared revelations,
and wrote colorful wind-sprints for poems.

What a pang to see you, decades later,
over nouvelle pizza and cappuccino,
—a beautifully suited, associate dean
at a large rambunctious university,
where you hold the entrails of academics
in perfectly manicured hands.

Married long, mother of two teenage girls
(How did you raise daughters?
We could barely raise ourselves),
you’re a distinguished folklorist with a penchant
for fascinating, perfectly researched “smut”
(so the mischief remains!).

As we talk like old friends no longer intimate,
laughing, nostalgic, visibly older,
and our eyes ransack the other’s face,
reading lines etched by unshared dramas,
I keep slipping off the rind of the present,
through mind mirage, deep into the theaters of memory.

I see you perfectly then: a young woman
in her padded cell on the ledge of the galaxy,
wide-eyed, foul-mouthed, vision’s pupil,
shooting the rapids on an optic nerve;
my wicker self, but in a pink corduroy smock,
analytical and macabre, not yet disabused;

growing bone-tough, and agile as a lizard’s tongue,
immune to fear’s teeth in desire’s throat
draining new loves starch white as old wounds;
eager to pin back the ribs of the world;
seductive as a cipher, and nobody’s victim.

But the passing years, the disobedience of distance!
I cheer your victories, wish on your wishes.
Heart’s tinder crackles in my words.
You manage to keep a little something in reserve.
We are the same and not the same,
uniquely other, but with pages of shared history.
Like grown sisters, we were young together.

Now accomplished and admirable,
we greet in public clothes, accept invented selves,
mix goodwill with the genteel respect
we save for distinguished strangers,
as we talk ideas, mothers, jobs, old cronies,
avoid the minefield of marriage,
romp a bit, indulge in the cozy pastime
of whatever happened to that scallywag so-and-so.

When you’ve gone, I dream of flame pots
set out on a moonless runway in darkest Arabia,
and a pilot me piecing together a way home
between the treachery of fog and mountains,
searching down through darkness
for streaks of familiar, precious landmarks
leading to where we might have been.

(Diane Ackerman [source])

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Our Only Hope Is to Be the Daylight

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[Image: “Wawona Tunnel, Yosemite National Park, 8:24AM,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

The important thing about despair is never to give up, never wrap up and put away a sterile life, but somehow keep it open. Because you never can know what’s coming; never. That’s the great thing about life, the crucial thing to remember. You may beat your fists on a stone wall for years and years, and every consideration of common sense will say it’s hopeless, forget it, spare yourself; and then one day your bleeding hand will go through as if the wall were theatrical gauze; you’ll be in another realm where birds are singing and love is possible, and you’d have missed it if you’d given up, because it might be only that one day the wall was not stone.

(Allen Wheelis [source])

…and:

For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid

There is a country to cross you will
find in the corner of your eye, in
the quick slip of your foot—air far
down, a snap that might have caught.
And maybe for you, for me, a high, passing
voice that finds its way by being
afraid. That country is there, for us,
carried as it is crossed. What you fear
will not go away: it will take you into
yourself and bless you and keep you.
That’s the world, and we all live there.

(William Stafford [source])

…and:

Our existence is finite. The self that we have created through so many years of effort and suffering will die. And sustained though we may be by the idea, the hope, the certainty that some portion of us will eternally endure, we also must acknowledge that this “I” who breathes and loves and works and knows itself will be forever and ever and ever… obliterated.

So, whether or not we live with images of continuity—of immortality—we also will have to live with a sense of transience, aware that no matter how passionately we love whatever we love, we don’t have the power to make either it, or us, stay.

(Judith Viorst [source])

…and:

The Thing Is

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you’ve held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, how can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.

(Ellen Bass [source])

…and (in slightly different and excerpted form):

In the Middle

of a life that’s as complicated as everyone else’s,
struggling for balance, juggling time.
The mantle clock that was my grandfather’s
has stopped at 9:20; we haven’t had time
to get it repaired. The brass pendulum is still,
the chimes don’t ring. One day you look out the window,
green summer, the next, and the leaves have already fallen,
and a grey sky lowers the horizon. Our children almost grown,
our parents gone, it happened so fast. Each day, we must learn
again how to love, between morning’s quick coffee
and evening’s slow return. Steam from a pot of soup rises,
mixing with the yeasty smell of baking bread. Our bodies
twine, and the big black dog pushes his great head between;
his tail is a metronome, 3/4 time. We’ll never get there,
Time is always ahead of us, running down the beach, urging
us on faster, faster, but sometimes we take off our watches,
sometimes we lie in the hammock, caught between the mesh
of rope and the net of stars, suspended, tangled up
in love, running out of time.

(Barbara Crooker [source])

From elsewhere:

“Do you remember that piece of footage on the local news, just as the first tower comes down, woman runs in off the street into a store, just gets the door closed behind her, and here comes this terrible black billowing, ash, debris, sweeping through the streets, gale force past the window… that was the moment, Maxi. Not when ‘everything changed.’ When everything was revealed. No grand Zen illumination, but a rush of blackness and death. Showing us exactly what we’ve become, what we’ve been all the time.”

“And what we’ve always been is…?”

“Is living on borrowed time. Getting away cheap. Never caring about who’s paying for it, who’s starving somewhere else all jammed together so we can have cheap food, a house, a yard in the burbs… planetwide, more every day, the payback keeps gathering. And meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead. Boo fuckin hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There’s no uninnocent dead.”

After a while, “You’re not going to explain that, or…”

“Course not, it’s a koan.”

(Thomas Pynchon [source])

Living With the News

Can I get used to it day after day
a little at a time while the tide keeps
coming in faster the waves get bigger
building on each other breaking records
this is not the world that I remember
then comes the day when I open the box
that I remember packing with such care
and there is the face that I had known well
in little pieces staring up at me
it is not mentioned on the front pages
but somewhere back near the real estate
among the things that happen every day
to someone who now happens to be me
and what can I do and who can tell me
then there is what the doctor comes to say
endless patience will never be enough
our only hope is to be the daylight

(W.S. Merwin [source])

…and:

# 30: You think your country lurches towards disaster.

You think your neighbors have lost their minds.

You think when you wake up tomorrow, things will be worse than they were this morning.

You’re probably right…

…and you’re probably wrong.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

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Trying All the Tricks (Especially Not Trying) to Keep Moving Forward

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[Image: “Slow Moving,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Humanity is under great pressure to evolve because it is our only chance of survival as a race. This will affect every aspect of your life and close relationships in particular. Never before have relationships been as problematic and conflict ridden as they are now. As you may continue to pursue the goal of salvation through a relationship, you will be disillusioned again and again. But if you accept that the relationship is here to make you conscious instead of happy, then the relationship will offer you salvation, and you will be aligning yourself with the higher consciousness that wants to be born into this world. For those who hold to the old patterns, there will be increasing pain, violence, confusion, and madness.

(Eckhart Tolle [source])

…and (italicized portion):

The Zen Master warns: “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” This admonition points up that no meaning that comes from outside of ourselves is real. The Buddhahood of each of us has already been obtained. We need only recognize it. Philosophy, religion, patriotism, all are empty idols. The only meaning in our lives is what we each bring to them. Killing the Buddha on the road means destroying the hope that anything outside ourselves can be our master. No one is bigger than anyone else. There are no mothers and fathers for grown-ups, only sisters and brothers.

(Sheldon Kopp [source])

…and:

Moving Forward

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

(Rainer Maria Rilke, translated by Robert Bly [source])

From elsewhere:

What I want isn’t a moral. I don’t want to die. But I do want to be able to.

Death not as destination but as horizon. Not death up close. His desire not for the end but to continue not-ending in a quite new way. In the shadow of life’s culminating end. And if that was what he craved, wasn’t that, though he hadn’t said this to her either, to suggest that he was not, now, living? What could it be, to exist with the banality of endlessness?

(Keanu Reeves [source])

…and:

Letter to Noah’s Wife

You are never mentioned on Ararat
or elsewhere, but I know a woman’s hand
in salvation when I see it. Lately,
I’m torn between despair and ignorance.
I’m not a vegetarian, shop plastic,
use an air conditioner. Is this what happens
before it all goes fluvial? Do the selfish
grow self-conscious by the withering
begonias? Lately, I worry every black dress
will have to be worn to a funeral.
New York a bouillon, eroded filigree.
Anything but illness, I beg the plagues,
but shiny crows or nuclear rain.
Not a drop in London May through June.
I bask in the wilt by golden hour light.
Lately, only lately, it is late. Tucking
our families into the safeties of the past.
My children, will they exist by the time
it’s irreversible? Will they live
astonished at the thought of ice
not pulled from the mouth of a machine?
Which parent will be the one to break
the myth; the Arctic wasn’t Sisyphus’s
snowy hill. Noah’s wife, I am wringing
my hands not knowing how to know
and move forward. Was it you
who gathered flowers once the earth
had dried? How did you explain the light
to all the animals?

(Maya C. Popa [source])

…and:

Anyone whose goal is “something higher” must expect some day to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? Then why to we feel it even when the observation tower comes equipped with a sturdy handrail? No, vertigo is something other than the fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves…

We might also call vertigo the intoxication of the weak. Aware of his weakness, a man decides to give in rather than stand up to it. He is drunk with weakness, wishes to grow even weaker, wishes to fall down in the middle of the main square in front of everybody, wishes to be down, lower than down.

(Milan Kundera [source: here and here])

…and:

The Tent

When did hordes of sentences start beginning with So?
As if everything were always pending,
leaning on what came before.
What can you expect?
Loneliness everywhere, entertained or kept in storage.
So you felt anxious to be alone.
Easier to hear, explore a city, room,
mound of hours, no one walking beside you.
Talking to self endlessly, but mostly listening.
This would not be strange.
It would be the tent you slept in.
Waking calmly inside whatever
you had to do would be freedom.
It would be your country.
The men in front of me had whole acres
in their eyes. I could feel them cross, recross each day.
Memory, stitched. History, soothed.
What we do or might prefer to do. Have done.
How we got here. Telling ourselves a story
till it’s compact enough to bear.
Passing the walls, wearing the sky,
the slight bow and rising of trees.
Everything ceaselessly holding us close.
So we are accompanied.
Never cast out without a line of language to reel us back.
That is what happened, how I got here.
So maybe. One way anyway.
A story was sewn, seed sown,
this was what patriotism meant to me—
to be at home inside my own head long enough
to accept its infinite freedom
and move forward anywhere, to mysteries coming.
Even at night in a desert, temperatures plummet,
billowing tent flaps murmur to one other.

(Naomi Shihab Nye [source])

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Dancing a Gingerly Two-Step along an Uncertain Border

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[Cartoon (spotted on Instagram) by the artist known as worry__lines.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (first paragraph):

I’ve been thinking about something for a long time, and I keep noticing that most human speech – if not all human speech – is made with the outgoing breath. This is the strange thing about presence and absence. When we breathe in, our bodies are filled with nutrients and nourishment. Our blood is filled with oxygen, our skin gets flush; our bones get harder – they get compacted. Our muscles get toned and we feel very present when we’re breathing in. The problem is, that when we’re breathing in, we can’t speak. So presence and silence have something to do with each other.

The minute we start breathing out, we can talk; speech is made with the outgoing, exhaled breath. The problem that this poses, though, is that as we exhale, nutrients are leaving our bodies; our bones get softer, our muscles get flaccid, our skin starts to loosen. You could think of that as the dying breath. So as we breath out, we have less and less presence.

When we make verbal meaning, we use the dying breath. In fact, the more I say, the more my meaning is disclosed. Meaning grows in opposite ratio to presence or vitality. That’s a weird thing. I don’t know why God made us that way.

It’s a kind of paradigm for life, right? As we die, the meaning of our life gets disclosed. Maybe the paradigm for living is encoded or embedded in speech itself, and every time we speak we’re enacting on a small-scale, microcosmic level the bigger scale of our lives. So that the less vitality we have, the more the meaning of our lives get disclosed.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and (highlighted portion):

The Impossible Dream

In Delaware a Congressman
accused of sexual misconduct
says clearly at the press conference,
speaking
right into the microphone
that he would like very much
to do it again.

It was on the radio
and Carla laughed
as she painted, Die, You Pig
in red nail polish
on the back of a turtle
she plans to turn loose tomorrow
in Jerry’s backyard.

We lived near the high school that year
and in the afternoons, in autumn,
we could hear the marching-band rehearsals
from the stadium:
off-key trumpets, carried by the wind,
drums and weirdly smeared trombones:

a ragged ‘Louie Louie’
or sometimes, ‘The Impossible Dream’.

I was reading a book about pleasure,
how you have to glide through it
without clinging,

like an arrow
passing through a target,
coming out the other side and going on.

Sitting at the picnic table
carved with the initials of the previous tenants;
thin October sunlight
blessing the pale grass —
you would have thought we had it all —

But the turtle in Carla’s hand
churned its odd stiff legs like oars,
as if it wasn’t made for holding still,

and the high-school band played
worse than ever for a moment
— as if getting the song right
was the impossible dream.

(Tony Hoagland [source])

From elsewhere:

The Weight of Sweetness

No easy thing to bear, the weight of sweetness.

Song, wisdom, sadness, joy: sweetness
equals three of any of these gravities.

See a peach bend
the branch and strain the stem until
it snaps.
Hold the peach, try the weight, sweetness
and death so round and snug
in your palm.
And, so, there is
the weight of memory:

Windblown, a rain-soaked
bough shakes, showering
the man and the boy.
They shiver in delight,
and the father lifts from his son’s cheek
one green leaf
fallen like a kiss.

The good boy hugs a bag of peaches
his father has entrusted
to him.
Now he follows
his father, who carries a bagful in each arm.
See the look on the boy’s face
as his father moves
faster and farther ahead, while his own steps
flag, and his arms grow weak, as he labors
under the weight
of peaches.

(Li-Young Lee [source])

…and:

Our bodies are shot with mortality. Our legs are fear and our arms are time. These chill humors seep through our capillaries, weighting each cell with an icy dab of nonbeing, and that dab grows and swells and sucks the cell dry. That is why physical courage is so important—it fills, as it were, the holes—and why it is so invigorating. The least brave act, chance taken and passage won, makes you feel loud as a child.

But it gets harder. The courage of children and beasts is a function of innocence. We let our bodies go the way of our fears. A teenaged boy, king of the world, will spend weeks in front of a mirror perfecting some difficult trick with a lighter, a muscle, a tennis ball, a coin. Why do we lose interest in physical mastery? If I feel like turning cartwheels—and I do—why don’t I learn to turn cartwheels, instead of regretting that I never learned as a child? We could all be aerialists like squirrels, divers like seals; we could be purely patient, perfectly fleet, walking on our hands even, if our living or stature required it. We can’t even sit straight, or support our weary heads.

When we lose our innocence—when we start feeling the weight of the atmosphere and learn that there’s death in the pot—we take leave of our senses. Only children can hear the song of the male house mouse. Only children keep their eyes open.

(Annie Dillard [source])

…and:

I like the American-Canadian border, ’cause if you’re walking on the border with a friend, and you push your friend into Canada, he can’t push you back right away, ’cause first he has to go through customs. “What brings you to Canada?” [Points to the side] “That asshole.” “When are you leaving?” “As soon as I regain my equilibrium!”

(Mitch Hedberg [source])

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In the Midst of The Static, One (Possible) Voice

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[Image: “The Heartbeat of a Typophile,” an interpretation of a heartbeat, created by displaying the title phrase as it appears using a font called “FR Pasta Mono.” The font is the creation of a type designer named Béla Frank; I found this “cardiographic” illustration posted (under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) on Flickr, in the photostream of a user there identified as arnoKath.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

Many a time have I merely closed my eyes at the end of yet another troublesome day and soaked my bruised psyche in wild water, rivers remembered and rivers imagined. Rivers course through my dreams, rivers cold and fast, rivers well-known and rivers nameless, rivers that seem like ribbons of blue water twisting through wide valleys, narrow rivers folded in layers of darkening shadows, rivers that have eroded down deep into the mountain’s belly, sculpted the land, peeled back the planet’s history exposing the texture of time itself.

(Harry Middleton [source])

…and:

Fall In

Write without reason.
Go too far. Fall in, fall in.
Say I am here, my palms are open
even though you are lost and don’t know
who you are.

(Laurie Doctor [source])

…and:

Egocentricity, the illusion of separateness, requires constant maintenance. What maintains it is that endless buzz-buzz-buzz in our minds, telling us who we are, who they are, what we are doing, what is important, where we are going next – creating that subject-object relationship in every split second. The continual brainwashing that maintains our identity is like a tape loop.

Every time we pay attention, every time we are present, it is like cutting through that tape. Of course, the tape is instantly spliced back together again, so in the beginning there can be these little snips and then these quick repairs, and you can’t really tell any damage was done. But when you start paying attention more, the snips are more frequent. Then egocentricity gets in a real bind, because if we continue to pay attention, we are going to see how it all works, how the illusion is created.

The first thing we see is how most of what goes on in our minds is nonsense. Here we are, trying to think deep and yet lofty thoughts, but in fact it’s mostly gobbledygook.

Egocentricity continues to play those tapes that maintain our conditioning. But once you see what is happening, the power of it falls away. And you begin to change; you are not able to hold the identity together in the same way.

Ego’s only hope of maintaining the illusion of separateness is to get you to quit paying attention to what goes on in your mind.

(Cheri Huber, Trying to be Human [source])

From elsewhere:

…and:

I have seen the souls of the dead, traveling in a branching river; they look very much like white blood cells, a pale doughnut-like shape, I cannot tell whether there is anything in the centers, or whether the centers are empty. When one of them comes to a fork in the river, it need not go either one way or the other; it may go both ways. It is able to do this because souls are not bound by time in the same way that living bodies are, so that it is able to exist in what we would understand as two places at once. Also it can move either backward or forward in time, in addition to what we might call this sideways motion, this ability to exist simultaneously in different spaces. Some souls are interested in our world and try to speak to us, but it is really very difficult for them to have much effect, not having bodies of their own, and some of them go around looking for people to talk to, but there are so few of us who can hear them. The recently dead are remembered by the living and so they can speak to them for a while, these people are receptive, but those who are long dead have a much smaller chance of finding anyone and they become fuzzy, their particular features are worn away as they go tumbling along in the great river. They glow, they wait for us, but we cannot find them. Sometimes you will hear one calling from very far away, very faint waves or pulses like a radio broadcast from a planet in another galaxy, scattered signals that are almost impossible to distinguish from the static, which is made up of meaningless bits and pieces of other voices that have broken down over the great distance into a kind of dust. But in the midst of this static you will think you can identify one voice, sentences that you can almost piece together, as an archaeologist can construct an entire body from a few splinters of bone; but of course sometimes you will get it wrong, and this is a great tragedy, both for you and for the soul who is trying to communicate with you. I am talking to you… Be careful. Can you understand what I’m saying?

(Kirsten Bakis [source])

…and:

Praisesong

At the coffee shop you love,
white mugs heavy on the table
between us, young baristas—
spiky haired and impatient—
cannot imagine how two people
so old to them can feel so wanton,
coffee growing cold between us,
middle-aged bodies growing hot
under the other’s gaze. Even now,
apart, you send me songs so I may
listen to love from the golden throat
of a saxophone, piano keys playing
jazz across my soft belly.
How is it the tide of terror
has quit rising in me, or rises
and recedes as tides do, bringing
sea glass worked smooth
and lovely by the sheer fact
of time, bringing trash—
plastic mesh and old sneakers—
useless things now we might
bag up and remove, bringing
a lapping tongue of water up
over our toes as we hold hands
and walk along its edge—
carefully, gleefully, both.

(Sarah Browning [source])

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Pausing Each Day at the Gateless Gate… Then Stepping Through

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[Image: “Tallulah Falls” (1841), by George Cooke. Why this? See the excerpt from Alan Lightman’s essay, below.]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book:

To Waiting

You spend so much of your time
expecting to become
someone else
always someone
who will be different
someone to whom a moment
whatever moment it may be
at last has come
and who has been
met and transformed
into no longer being you
and so has forgotten you

meanwhile in your life
you hardly notice
the world around you
lights changing
sirens dying along the buildings
your eyes intent
on a sight you do not see yet
not yet there
as long as you
are only yourself

with whom as you
recall you were
never happy
to be left alone for long

(W. S. Merwin [source])

…and:

Wonder begins with the element of surprise. The now almost obsolete word “wonderstruck” suggests that wonder breaks into consciousness with a dramatic suddenness that produces amazement or astonishment. We can no more create a state of wonderment than we can plan a surprise for ourselves. Consider, for example, how strange it would be to say, “I’m going out for a walk and wonder at the dogwoods in bloom.” It may, indeed, happen that the dogwoods will evoke wonder, but we cannot be assured of it prior to the experience.

Because of the suddenness with which it appears, wonder reduces us momentarily to silence. We associate gaping, breathlessness, bewilderment, and even stupor with wonder, because it jolts us out of the world of common sense in which our language is at home. The language and categories we customarily use to deal with experience are inadequate to the encounter, and hence we are initially immobilized and dumbfounded. We are silent before some new dimension of meaning which is being revealed.

(Sam Keen [source])

…and:

This is my living faith, an active faith, a faith of verbs: to question, explore, experiment, experience, walk, run, dance, play, eat, love, learn, dare, taste, touch, smell, listen, argue, speak, write, read, draw, provoke, emote, scream, sin, repent, cry, kneel, pray, bow, rise, stand, look, laugh, cajole, create, confront, confound, walk back, walk forward, circle, hide, and seek.

To seek: to embrace the questions, be wary of answers.

(Terry Tempest Williams [source])

…and:

Anyone can see that if grasping and aversion were with us all day and night without ceasing, who could ever stand them? Under that condition, living things would either die or become insane. Instead, we survive because there are natural periods of coolness, of wholeness, and ease. In fact, they last longer than the fires of our grasping and fear. It is this that sustains us. We have periods of rest making us refreshed, alive, well. Why don’t we feel thankful for this everyday Nirvana?

We already know how to let go—we do it every night when we go to sleep, and that letting go, like a good night’s sleep, is delicious. Opening in this way, we can live in the reality of our wholeness. A little letting go brings us a little peace, a greater letting go brings us a greater peace. Entering the gateless gate, we begin to treasure the moments of wholeness. We begin to trust the natural rhythm of the world, just as we trust our own sleep and how our own breath breathes itself.

(Jack Kornfield [source])

From elsewhere:

Wonders

In a wide hoop of lamplight, two children—
a girl and her younger brother—jump marbles
on a star-shaped playboard. Beside them,
in a chair near a window, their father
thinks of his mother, her recent death

and the grief he is trying to gather.
It is late October. The hooplight spreads
from the family, through the window,
to the edge of a small orchard, where
a sudden frost has stripped the fruit leaves
and only apples hang, heavy and still
on the branches.

The man looks from the window, down
to a scrapbook of facts he is reading.
The spider is proven to have memory, he says,
and his son, once again, cocks his small face
to the side, speaks a guttural oh, as if
this is some riddle he is slowly approaching,
as if this long hour, troubled with phrases
and the queer turn in his father’s voice,
is offered as a riddle.

There is the sound of marbles
in their suck-hole journeys, and the skittery
jump of the girl’s shoe
as she waits, embarrassed, for her father
to stop, to return to his known self, thick
and consistent as a family bread.
But still he continues,

plucking scraps from his old book, old
diary of wonders: the vanishing borders
of mourning paper, the ghostly shape
in the candled egg, beak and eye
etched clearly, a pin-scratch of claw.

A little sleet scrapes at the window.
The man blinks, sees his hand on the page
as a boy’s hand, sees his children bent over
the playboard, with the careful pattern
of their lives dropping softly away, like
leaves in a sudden frost—how the marbles
have stalled, heavy and still on their fingers,
and after each phrase the guttural
oh, and the left shoe jumping.

(Linda Bierds [source])

…and:

…many had a lingering feeling that human beings were somehow separated from the rest of nature. Such a view is nowhere better illustrated than in the painting Tallulah Falls (1841) by American painter George Cooke, an artist associated with the Hudson River School. Although this group of artists celebrated nature, they also believed that human beings were set apart from the natural world. Cooke’s painting depicts tiny human figures standing on a small promontory above a deep canyon. The people are dwarfed by tree-covered mountains, massive rocky ledges, and a waterfall pouring down to the canyon below. Not only insignificant in size compared with their surroundings, the human beings are mere witnesses to a scene they are not part of and never could be.

(Alan Lightman [source])

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When I Walked onto the Strand, I Recognized Nothing

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[Image: “The Strand at Carmel-by-the-Sea,” by John E. Simpson. (Photo shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.)]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (the third stanza included there; this is the complete poem):

On Living

I

Living is no laughing matter:
        you must live with great seriousness
                like a squirrel, for example—
        I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
                I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
        you must take it seriously,
        so much so and to such a degree
      that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
                                your back to the wall,
        or else in a laboratory
                in your white coat and safety glasses,
                you can die for people—
             even for people whose faces you’ve never seen,
             even though you know living
                is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
        I mean, you must take living so seriously
             that even at seventy, for example, you’ll plant olive trees—
             and not for your children, either,
             but because although you fear death you don’t believe it,
             because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Let’s say you’re seriously ill, need surgery—
which is to say we might not get
    from the white table.
Even though it’s impossible not to feel sad
    about going a little too soon,
we’ll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we’ll look out the window to see it’s raining,
or still wait anxiously
    for the latest newscast…
Let’s say we’re at the front—
  for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
  we might fall on our face, dead.
We’ll know this with a curious anger,
    but we’ll still worry ourselves to death
    about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let’s say we’re in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say, 
   before the iron doors will open.
We’ll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind—
      I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
    we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
               and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet—
  I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even 
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
  in pitch-black space… 
You must grieve for this right now
—you have to feel this sorrow now—
for the world must be loved this much
                               if you’re going to say “I lived”…

(Nâzim Hikmet, translated by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk [source])

…and (in slightly different form):

Our purpose is to consciously, deliberately evolve toward a wiser, more liberated and luminous state of being, to return to Eden, make friends with the snake, and set up our computers among the wild apple trees.

Deep down, all of us are probably aware that some kind of mystical evolution—a melding into the godhead, into love—is our true task. Yet we suppress the notion with considerable force be-cause to admit it is to acknowledge that most of our political gyrations, religious dogmas, social ambitions, and financial ploys are not merely counterproductive but trivial. Our mission is to jettison those pointless preoccupations and take on once again the primordial cargo of inexhaustible ecstasy. Or, barring that, to turn out a good thin-crust pizza and a strong glass of beer.

(Tom Robbins [source])

From elsewhere:

The history of science can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once accepted as “givens” as phenomena that can now be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the fully explained: the hue of the sky, the orbits of planets, the angle of the wake of a boat moving through a lake, the six-sided patterns of snowflakes, the weight of a flying bustard, the temperature of boiling water, the size of raindrops, the circular shape of the sun. All of these phenomena and many more, once thought to have been fixed at the beginning of time or the result of random events thereafter, have ultimately been explained as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature—laws found by us human beings.

(Alan Lightman [source])

…and:

The Doctor Sighs

as he removes the otoscope
It’s not just the hammer,

anvil, and stirrup, he says.
It’s the blacksmith, too.
And the dry goods store
with the weaselly clerk,
not to mention the saloon
rife with cowboys and
a prostitute with humble
cleavage. And I’m afraid
it’s also the calibrated hearts
in that freezing ten-room
hotel, the mayor’s daughter
weeping into well water,
the moon spreading its
anxious light over everything

In short, Ronald, I’m not
surprised you called
for an appointment today.

(Ron Koertge [source])

…and:

# 28 (“I See What You Did There”): The history of art and philosophy can, in fact, be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that have never been accepted as “givens” as real phenomena that cannot be understood entirely, if at all, in terms of fundamental causes and principles. One can add to the list of the inadequately explained: the circular shape of the sky, the six-sided patterns of planets, the hue of the wake of a bustard moving through a lake, the angle of snowflakes, the temperature of a flying boat, the orbits of water, the size of raindrops, the boiling weight of the sun. None of these phenomena, and many more, are explicable as necessary consequences of the fundamental laws of nature–laws found by us human beings. But there they are: comprehensible, apparently meaningful, even profound, but defying explanation.

(JES, Maxims for Nostalgists)

…and:

The human body is the most resistant thing there is to magic, ’cause it’s a vessel of will.

(T.L. Huchu [source])

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Both of These Things Can Be True (But One May Be Truer)

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[Image: “New York shops don’t try to mislead you,” by Ed Yourdon. (Found it on Flickr, where it was shared under a Creative Commons license — thank you!) I recognized the photographer‘s name immediately: he was a very influential tech guy back in the 1970s, when I started working in software development. I had no idea he was also a prolific photographer… but, well, I guess both of those things could be true, eh?]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book (in slightly different form; below is the original):

Man becomes a historical animal preoccupied with the past and the future, and here we encounter the strangest of paradoxes… The historical idea of self, the ego, requires a constant re-living of memories in order to sustain a continuity of its own. It is only aware of itself as a repeatedly up-dated autobiography. The ego does not actually exist — it is an illusion of continuity…

So the conventional ego, the false passport, is built up from an edited picture album of our past. That version often seems more real than we are in the present moment. That is because here/now we are in constant flux and flow, but what we have been is nicely and securely fixed. The false identity is frozen throughout time, a final static noun. And just because it is unchanging we become more clearly identified with that identity card than we do with the real living, moment-to-moment entity.

In order to support the new false self we have to become more and more identified with the past, with old knowledge and a fixed belief system which continue to bolster up our historical selves. And we forget there was ever anything else.

(Yatri [source])

…and:

Every time a thought is born, you are born. When the thought is gone, you are gone. But the ‘you’ does not let the thought go, and what gives continuity to this ‘you’ is thinking. Actually there’s no permanent entity in you, no totality of all your thoughts and experiences. You think that there is ‘somebody’ who is feeling your feelings – that’s the illusion. I can say it is an illusion but it is not an illusion to you.

(U.G. Krishnamurti [source])

…and:

we must

we must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.

nobody is going
to do it
for us.

as the young boys
ski
down the slopes

as the fry cook
gets his last
paycheck

as dog chases
dog

as the chessmaster
loses more than
the game

we must bring
our own light
to the
darkness.

nobody is going
to do it for us,

as the lonely
telephone
anybody
anywhere

as the great beast
trembles
in nightmare

as the final season
leaps into
focus

nobody is going
to do it
for us.

(Charles Bukowski [source])

From elsewhere:

This incapacity to die, ironically but inevitably, throws mankind out of the actuality of living, which for all normal animals is at the same time dying; the result is denial of life (repression). The incapacity to accept death turns the death instinct into its distinctively human and distinctively morbid form. The distraction of human life to the war against death, by the same inevitable irony, results in death’s dominion over life.

(Norman O. Brown [source])

…and:

“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered [Father Brown]. “What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way. It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end.”

(G.K. Chesterton [source])

…and:

Yes No Days

Every day he thought before he went outside.
If it was a yes day things would be
as they seemed. So everything comes true.
His face a lonely moon in the window, his
house resting on a quiet spine. It took
courage to step from a warm house
on a no day. The world might swing wrong,
and yes, a no day could become
a yes day, and vice versa. There were days
like windows facing out and faces wanting
back in. “Isn’t the sky nice?” he hears
his mother say, so he lets go
of the cat who is right on the brink
of telling all she knows.

(Ralph Burns [source])

…and:

I was intrigued by the fact that even though I had learned that gravity pulls us toward the earth as we orbit the sun—and that there is no real “up” and “down”—my feeling of being down on the ground below the sky had remained unchanged. To shift my perspective, I would sometimes lie outside with my arms and legs outstretched and take in as much of the sky and horizon as possible. Attempting to break free of the familiar feeling of being down here with the moon and stars above me, I would relax all my muscles—surrendering to the force holding me tightly to the surface of our planet—and focus on the truth of my situation: I’m floating around the universe on this giant sphere—suspended here by gravity and going for a ride. Lying there, I could sense that I was in fact looking out at the sky, rather than up. The delight I experienced came from temporarily silencing a false intuition and glimpsing a deeper truth: being on the earth doesn’t separate us from the rest of the universe; indeed, we are and have always been in outer space.

(Annaka Harris [source])

…and:

Happiness

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine

(Jane Kenyon [source])

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