A poem. Sometimes that is all we need.

The Journey

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
but little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do
determined to save
the only life you could save

-Mary Oliver

what is shadowing you?

“Most of the shadows of this life are caused by standing in our own sunshine.”
– Henry Ward Beecher

words

“If you will cling to Nature, to the simple in Nature, to the little things that hardly anyone sees, and that can so unexpectedly become big and beyond measuring; if you have this love of inconsiderable things and seek quite simply, as one who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier, more coherent and somehow more conciliatory for you, not in your intellect, perhaps, which lags marveling behind, but in your inmost consciousness, waking and cognizance.” ~Rainer Maria Rilke

quiet until the thaw

Her name tells of how
it was with her.

The truth is, she did not speak
in winter.
Everybody learned not to
ask her questions in winter,
once this was known about her.

The first winter this happened
we looked in her mouth to see
if something was frozen. Her tongue
maybe, or something else in there.

But after the thaw she spoke again
and told us it was fine for her that way.

So each spring we
looked forward to that.

~swampy cree indian narrative poem

letters to a young poet – adrienne rich

“It’s not the dejavu that kills

it’s the forseeing

the head that speaks from the crater

I wanted to go somewhere

the brain had not yet gone

I wanted not to be

there so alone.”

~adrienne rich