Today I decided to simply share a few poems and a couple of quotes that have inspired me over the years.
This is what Pulitzer prize-winning poet William Carlos Williams has to say about poetry: "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
The Peace of Wild Things
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
Wendell Berry
The Reluctant Prophet
I am content with pebbles,
Speckled and wave-smoothed, delicate
In the subtle changes of their shapes and shading.
Picked out, one here, one there, even
A mound of them encourages
A quiet contemplation.
But this is a beach of boulders,
Pathless, where I am sent for water.
Everything I know of hand-held stones
Is now beside the point,
Where footholds must be carved
And landmarks charted
And jagged edges blatantly
Defy straight lines.
Ellen R. Young
© Sojourners, 1978
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Forget About Enlightenment
Sit down wherever you are and listen to the wind singing in your veins. Feel the love, the longing,
the fear in your bones. Open your heart to who you are, right now, not who you would like to be, not the saint you are striving to become, but the being right here before you,
inside you, around you. All of you is holy. You are already more and less than whatever you can know. Breathe out, touch in, let go.
John Welwood
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“I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power, that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted, and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.
"But I find that thy will knows no end in me, and when old words die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from the heart, and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.”
Rabindranath Tagore
Until next time,
Dawn
Photo credits:
SerenitySpell.com
Janko Ferlic, unSplash
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