[Image: “Black Walnuts, by the Thousand,” by John E. Simpson; a sample from my gallery called #plantsthatlookgood. (Shared here under a Creative Commons License; for more information, see this page at RAMH.) This photo, taken in early 2018, doesn’t do justice to the enormous quantity of the things beneath the tree from which they’d fallen. Nevertheless, in my mind, for some reason I’ve always associated it with the notion of “profusion.”]

From whiskey river:

The History of Too Much

There is too much here, the sapphire, the thistle,
the oregano blooms in June, everything extravagant —
the rich peat of what decays, the ruins that don’t decay,
these especially are too much, the temples and statues
in their stark marble glow, that simplicity which is not simple at all.
This sheen of time, the wear of wars, the famine years
of Occupation, lucent as the columns standing stoic, Doric —
their weight has whittled the people: the weight of that antiquity,
of those stones, the grandeur and pride — too much
in this moment, this present crushed by the evidence,
the result of living with beheaded gods, and maimed still
beautiful torsos, the muscled limbs in chipped robes.
They plague our dreams, what was once achieved is now
incomplete, these pieces of the golden age aging
in the midst of traffic, too much, the yelling and honking,
the protests in the middle of everything — people are impatient;
how can anyone be patient, overwhelmed as they are.
Even the oregano’s thick perfume, the sapphire sea, remind people
of extravagant loves and sacrifice, while here, now,
ghosts live on as gods and their impossibility.

(Adrianne Kalfopoulou [source; also see here])

…and:

I had this sudden awareness […] of how the moments of our lives go out of existence before we’re conscious of having lived them. It’s only a relatively few moments that we get to keep and carry with us for the rest of our lives. Those moments are our lives. Or maybe it’s more like those moments are the dots in what we call our lives, or the lines we draw between them, connecting them into imaginary pictures of ourselves. You know, like those mythical pictures of constellations traced between stars.

(Stuart Dybek [source])

…and:

Singing Bowl

Begin the song exactly where you are.
Remain within the world of which you’re made.
Call nothing common in the earth or air.

Accept it all and let it be for good.
Start with the very breath you breathe in now,
This moment’s pulse, this rhythm in your blood

And listen to it, ringing soft and low.
Stay with the music, words will come in time.
Slow down your breathing. Keep it deep and slow.

Become an open singing bowl, whose chime
Is richness out of emptiness,
And timelessness resounding into time.

And when the heart is full of quietness
Begin the Song exactly where you are.

(Malcolm Guite [source — and don’t miss the video of Guite voicing the poem himself])

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