Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.
Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors of my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.
You may not agree, you may not care, but if you are holding this book you should know that of all the sights I love in this world -- and there are plenty -- very near the top of the list is this one: dogs without leashes.
You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without doubt,I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me.
Look, I want to love this world
as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get
to be alive
and know it.
A dog is adorable and noble, a dog is a true and loving friend. A dog is also a hedonist.
Like Magellan, let us find our islands To die in, far from home, from anywhere Familiar. Let us risk the wildest places, Lest we go down in comfort, and despair.
Every word is a messenger. Some have wings; some are filled with fire; some are filled with death.
A poet's interest in craft never fades, of course.
When loneliness comes stalking, go into the fields, consider the orderliness of the world.
Poetry is one of the original arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.
So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you love this world? Do you cherish your humble and silky life? Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
How heron comes It is a negligence of the mind not to notice how at dusk heron comes to the pond and stands there in his death robes, perfect servant of the system, hungry, his eyes full of attention, his wings pure light.
Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.
Poetry is a serious business; literature is the apparatus through which the world tries to keep intact its important ideas and feelings.
Oh, yesterday, that one, we all cry out. Oh, that one! How rich and possible everything was! How ripe, ready, lavish, and filled with excitement -- how hopeful we were on those summer days, under the clean, white racing clouds. Oh, yesterday!
I held my breath as we do sometimes to stop time when something wonderful has touched us.
And now you'll be telling stories of my coming back and they won't be false, and they won't be true but they'll be real.
Every year
the hatchlings wake in the swaying branches,
in the silver baskets,
and love the world.
Is it necessary to say any more?
Have you heard them singing in the wind, above the final fields?
Have you ever been so happy in your life?
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.
And who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
You must not ever stop being whimsical.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Whoever you are, not matter how lonely the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.
What misery to be afraid of death. What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.
And to tell the truth I don't want to let go of the wrists of idleness, I don't want to sell my life for money, I don't even want to come in out of the rain.
It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
I was hurrying through my own soul ... I was leaning out ... I was listening.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
The poem in which the reader does not feel himself or herself a participant is a lecture, listened to from an uncomfortable chair, in a stuffy room, inside a building.
The challenge is to keep up with all the new poets at the same time I love the old ones.
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.
I have a little dog who likes to nap with me. He climbs on my body and puts his face in my neck. He is sweeter than soap. He is more wonderful than a diamond necklace, which can't even bark.
I GO DOWN TO THE SHORE I go down to the shore in the morning and depending on the hour the waves are rolling in or moving out, and I say, oh, I am miserable, what shall-- what should I do? And the sea says in its lovely voice: Excuse me, I have work to do.
I don't know lots of things but I know this: next year when spring flows over the starting point I'll think I'm going to drown in the shimmering miles of it.
What is certain in the rational realm is by no means certain in the kingdom of swoon.
Who do you want to be in your one wild and precious life?
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
I don't know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention.
Love, love, love, says Percy. And hurry as fast as you can along the shining beach, or the rubble, or the dust. Then, go to sleep. Give up your body heat, your beating heart. Then, trust.
I don't ask for the sights in front of me to change, only the depth of my seeing.
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled -- -to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
Be prepared. A dog is adorable and noble.
A dog is a true and loving friend. A dog
is also a hedonist.
I know death is the fascinating snake under the leaves, sliding and sliding; I know the heart loves him too, can't turn away, can't break the spell. Everything wants to enter the slow thickness, aches to be peaceful finally and at any cost. Wants to be stone.
In the glare of your mind, be modest. And beholden to what is tactile, and thrilling.
I believe art is utterly important. It is one of the things that could save us.
I climb, I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.
You're like a little wild thing
that was never sent to school.
I know many lives worth living.
Maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us.
As long as you're dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.
Sometimes there are no rules.
To tell you the truth, I believe everything -- tigers, trees, stones -- are sentient in one way or another. You'd never catch me idly kicking a stone, for example.
Life is much the same when it's going well -- resonant and unremarkable. But who, not under disaster's seal, can understand what life is like when it begins to crumble?
The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.
Animals praise a good day, a good hunt. They praise rain if they're thirsty. That's prayer. They don't live an unconscious life, they simply have no language to talk about these things. But they are grateful for the good things that come along.
Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dak trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more the prettiness.
Don't we all die someday and someday comes all too soon? What will you do with your own wild, glorious chance at this thing we call life.
Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.
Sunrise What is the name of the deep breath I would take over and over for all of us? Call it whatever you want, it is happiness, it is another one of the ways to enter fire.
Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
To live in this world
you must be able
to do three things
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Because of the dog's joyfulness, our own is increased. It is no small gift.
Each body is a lion of courage, something precious of the earth.
I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars.
Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
Look, I want to love this world as though it's the last chance I'm ever going to get to be alive and know it.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Come with me into the woods where spring is advancing, as it does, no matter what, not being singular or particular, but one of the forever gifts, and certainly visible.
Why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world?
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.