Anything or anyone/That does not bring you alive/is too small for you

Sweet Darkness

When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.

When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.

Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.

There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.

The dark will be your womb
tonight.

The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.

You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.

Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.

Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn

anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive

is too small for you.

 -- David Whyte
     from The House of Belonging
     ©1996 Many Rivers Press

Do not try to save/the whole world

Clearing
by Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently,
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands
and you recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know
how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

For a time....(I) am free.

The Peace of Wild Things

BY WENDELL BERRY

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 Peace of Wild Things" from The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry. Copyright © 1998. Published and reprinted by arrangement with Counterpoint Press.

Source: Collected Poems 1957-1982 (Counterpoint Press, 1985)

What does it mean that the earth is so beautiful?

(from) "Flow", Mary Oliver, Long Life


"...on this day as on so many others, a little song runs through my mind. I say a song because it passes musically, but it is really just words, a thought that is neither strange nor complex. In fact, how strange it would be not to think it -- not to have such music inside one's head and body, on such an afternoon. What does it mean, say the words, that the earth is so beautiful? And what shall I do about it? What is the gift that I should bring to the world? What is the life that I should live?"

I was born to lose myself inside this soft world.

Mindful

by Mary Oliver

Everyday
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for —
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world —
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant —
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these —
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

"Mindful" by Mary Oliver from Why I Wake Early. © Beacon Press, 2005. 

How can it ever be boring, at all?

Wise words courtesy of Steve Roggenbuck:

"We are animals on a rock in space. Sometimes we forgot that, because we have jobs, school, political systems, debt, law, clothes, television stations."

"Sometimes, I wanna shake people and say, 'Are you paying attention to what is going on? It's raining. Water is falling from the sky.'"

"And I mean we have the sunrise. And I mean, we have the pink light on the bottom of the clouds during a sunrise. And there used to be dinosaurs, on our planet. Probably in the place you are now."

"I like being around people who are dancing, because it seems like the closest that people usually come to directly celebrating the fact that they're alive."

"What I really want, is that moment when somebody brings it up. When somebody refuses to let pointless filler and formalities use up our time with each other. I just want somebody to say 'Hey, right now is our life. And I'm grateful that this is the one I get. I'm grateful that you are in it. I'm grateful that we get this moment together.' I just want to say that, and sometimes I'm too nervous to say it."

"..These are the moments when I know I'm fully alive. When I'm looking for it, I can find those moments all the time."

"And even when it means being fully sad, crying alone in my apartment after leaving my girlfriend of 6 years. Crying alone on a train after touring for 9 months."

"...I just stop and try not to think anything and just be in the place that I am."

"I don't want be in haze. I don't want to coast through any of it. I don't want to regret later that I didn't pay attention now. I don't want to sit through it like I'm waiting for something better."

"Sometimes, you can forget about the moon but then one day when you're walking out of a building, there it is in the sky.... and it kind of reminds you that you are on a rock in space, too."

"This is our family photo album. We are animals on a rock in space. We are part of this gigantic, confusing, brutal and awe-inspiring world. And it’s not boring to be here. And how can it ever be boring at all."