A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer lives are based on the labors of other people, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure that I have received and am still receiving.
Okinawa Soba, Sailing into Fuji, ca. 1920. Thank you, firsttimeuser.
How else could it have occurred to man to divide the cosmos, on the analogy of day and night, summer and winter, into a bright day-world and a dark night-world peopled with fabulous monsters, unless he had the prototype of such a division in himself, in the polarity between the conscious and the invisible and unknowable unconscious?
Here in my head, language
keeps making its tiny noises.
How can I hope to be friends
with the hard white stars
whose flaring and hissing are not speech
but a pure radiance?
How can I hope to be friends
with the yawning spaces between them
where nothing, ever, is spoken?
Tonight, at the edge of the field,
I stood very still, and looked up,
and tried to be empty of words.
What joy was it, that almost found me?
What amiable peace?
Then it was over, the wind
roused up in the oak trees behind me
and I fell back, easily.
Earth has a hundred thousand pure contraltos—
even the distant night bird
as it talks threat, as it talks love
over the cold, black fields.
Once, deep in the woods,
I found the white skull of a bear
and it was utterly silent—
and once a river otter, in a steel trap,
and it too was utterly silent.
What can we do
but keep on breathing in and out,
modest and willing, and in our places?
Listen, listen, I’m forever saying.
Listen to the river, to the hawk, to the hoof,
to the mockingbird, to the jack-in-the-pulpit—
then I come up with a few words, like a gift.
Even as now.
Even as the darkness has remains the pure, deep darkness.
Even as the stars have twirled a little, while I stood here,
looking up,
one hot sentence after another.
—Mary Oliver, from West Wind (1997)
Thank you, sharanam.
(Source: silencesounds)
by Milton Glaser: “This poster is an authorized reproduction of the well-known poster included in the Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits album in 1967.”
Happy 70th Birthday, Bob. Thanks for everything.
Jefferson Airplane: “Somebody to Love.” Thank you, chairofbullies. After the return to work from a lazy three day weekend, this is sounding pretty great.
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Thank you very much, rainingpages.
The ocean said to me once,
“Look!
Yonder on the shore
Is a woman, weeping.
I have watched her.
Go you and tell her this —
Her lover I have laid
In cool green hall.
There is wealth of golden sand
And pillars, coral-red;
Two white fish stand guard at his bier.
“Tell her this
And more —
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With a surplus of toys.”
—Stephen Crane
Thank you for submitting, campanadeviento
“You worry that I will leave you.
I will not leave you.
Only strangers travel.
Owning everything,
I have nowhere to go.”
—Leonard Cohen
Thank you, sketchofthepast.
“There were times when I could not afford to sacrifice the bloom of the present moment to any work, whether of the head or hand. I love a broad margin to my life. Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while birds sang around or flitted noiseless…until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler’s wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance…. For the most part I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished. Instead of singing, like the birds, I silently smiled at my incessant good fortune. As the sparrow had its trill, sitting on the hickory before my door, so I had my chuckle or suppressed warble which he might hear out of my nest.”
~from Walden, Henry David Thoreau
Thank you, Canoe in the Mist
