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| POEMS by Nancy
Mandala by Mariah Howard
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POEMS by OTHERS
It could have happened It had to happen It happened earlier. Later Nearer. Farther off It happened, but not to you.
You were saved because you were the first. You were saved because you were the last. Alone. With others. On the right. The left. Because it was raining. Because of the shade. Because it was sunny.
You were in luck -- there was a forest. You were in luck - there were no trees. You were in luck - a rake, a hook, a beam, a brake, a jamb, a turn, a quarter inch, an instant. You were in luck -- just then a straw went floating by.
As a result, because, although, despite. What would have happened if a hand, a foot, within an inch, a hairsbreadth from an unfortunate coincidence.
So you're here? Still dizzy from another dodge, close shave, reprieve? One hole in the net and you slipped through ? I couldn't be more shocked or speechless. Listen, how your heart pounds inside wme.
by Wistawa Szymborska ( Polish poet who won the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature).
Out beyond ideas of rightdoing and wrongdoing, there is a field. I'll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase each other doesn't make any sense. -Rumi
I am certain about nothing but the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. -Keats
You Do Not Have To Be Good You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep rivers, the mountains and the trees. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clear blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no 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.
by Mary Oliver I recommend Mary Oliver's New and Selected Poems : Beacon Press
When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox
when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth.
When it's over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
by Mary Oliver
LOVE AFTER LOVE The time will come when, with elation, you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror, and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was yourself. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your own life. - Derek Walcott
from the Tibetan Book of the Dead: "There is a time known as the between. The between voyager travels through uncharted territory, navigating dangers, attempting passage into the next life. There are times in life, after a death of some kind, when we are open to the slightest shifts, when our powers are acute, when we can change the future. The between voyager temporarily possesses an immensely heightened intelligence, extraordinary powers of concentration, special abilities of clairvoyance and teleportation, flexibility to become whatever can be imagined, and the openness to be radically transformed by a thought or a vision or an instruction."
"Imagine what would happen if families, and places of worship and schools - joined by television writers and radio talk show hosts, recording artists, athletes, movie stars, business executives and politicians - all would agree to teach children, by both word and example, honesty, respect, responsibility, compassion, self-discipline, perseverance and giving. What if all the adults, who seem so upset about the troubled lives of children, would indeed create a climate in which these core virtues would become, for all of us, a way of life?" Ernest Boyer, The Basic School
Excerpted from Honey From The Rock by Lawrence Kushner This is the setting out. The leaving of everything behind. Leaving the social milieu. The preconceptions. The definitions. The language. The narrowed field of vision The expectations. No longer expecting relationships, memories, words, or letters to mean what they used to mean. To be, in a word: Open. It is to begin with, all inside us. But because we are all miniature versions of the universe, it is also found far beyond. And because we are all biologically and spiritually part of the first man, the place preceded us. And because we all carry within us the genotype and vision of the last man, the place is foretold in us. There is no surprise in any of this. We have all known it all since before we were conceived by our most recent mother and father. So do not be confused if sometimes the place seems a real as your house or as illusory as your happiness. Only know in advance and instead that ordinary words will not be vessels or stores for some kinds of knowing. And this is the meaning of meaning: Being connected with something that is itself connected with something. Being part of a constellation of parts that is itself part of an even greater scheme. Or, in other words, that the notion of parts is in truth, a convenience we perpetrate so as to permit us not having to fathom the consequences of our most trivial acts. Nothing is entirely separate. No one acts with caprice. The Holy One is always involved. There is a place as far from here as breathing out is from breathing in. For the word is very near to you. Where life forever holds gentle sway over death, where people are human with the same grace that a willow is a willow, where the struggle and the yearning between male and female is at last resolved.
"I have found that some of the most horrible mistakes we made came after I ignored my intuition under what looked, at the time, like unshakeable evidence." Fletcher Byrom, former President, Kooper Company
"The final act of business judgment is intuitive." Alfred Sloan, former President, GM
We are the mirror as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste this minute of eternity. We are pain and what cures pain. We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. -Rumi
I live my life in growing orbits Which move out over the things of the world. Perhaps I can never achieve the last, but that will be my attempt. I am circling God around the ancient tower, and I have been circling for a thousand years. And I still don't know if I am a falcon or a storm, or a great song. - Rainer Marie Rilke
IN THE LEGENDS In the legends, it's always like this: still water, one person alone on a beach, oppositions silently sliding on each other like the two arguments of an earthquake, its inevitable faults. The mountains move in and out of clouds like secret doctrines. Red willows line up on the sand, not speaking to one another, and like this they have spent the night, and the morning, and their entire lives. After long silences, speech appears like a voice from a red willow bush, burning: I love you, or The bread pans are on that shelf, or I am afraid of dying. At one in the morning, poetry fastens with clean, desperate hands on my nightgown, saying Say this, say this, this is the perfect thing to say. And then whole lines arrive, whispering modestly Say me. Paulette Jiles
THE JOURNEY One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advise 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
``Thinking is never a sharp, linear process; it could rather be compared to the process of a boat on a lake. When you daydream, you drift before a wind; when you read or listen to a narrative you travel like a barge towed by a tug. But in each case, the progress of the boat causes ripples on the lake spreading in all directions - memories, images, associations; some of them move quicker than the boat and create anticipations; others penetrate into the deeps. When thinking is in the tow of the narrative, focal awareness must stick to its course and cannot follow the ripples on their journey across the lake; but it is their presence all around the horizon, on the peripheries of awareness, which provide resonance, color, depth and the atmosphere and feel of the story." page 159, The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler |
