I have been easy with trees
Too long.
Too familiar with mountains.
Joy has been a habit.
Now
Suddenly
This rain.
- Jack Gilbert
from Rain
"The unreal is more powerful than the real.
Because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.
Because it's only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die.
But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
If you can change the way people think. The way they see themselves. The way they see the world. If you do that, you can change the way people live their lives. And that's the only lasting thing you can create."
- Chuck Palahniuk
Choke
entheognosis
commonplace
Reminders
Before dawn, across the whole road
as I pass I feel spiderwebs.
Within people's voices, under their words or
woven into the pauses, I hear a hidden sound.
One thin green light flashes over a smooth sea
just as the sun goes down.
What roses lie on the altar of evening
I inhale carefully, to keep more of.
Tasting all these and letting them have
their ways to waken me, I shiver and resolve:
In my life, I will more than live.
- William Stafford
"I've always figured it that you die each day and each day is a box, you see, all numbered and neat; but never go back and lift the lids, because you've died a couple of thousand times in your life, and that's a lot of corpses, each dead a different way, each with a worse expression. Each of those days is a different you, somebody you don't know or understand or want to understand."
- Ray Bradbury
The Illustrated Man
commonplace
Here where the world ends, and has beginning,
Here where the sunlight-spring of all our minds
Has birth again, and new beginning
The seeker finds.
Here there is body's peace, and the heart's uprising,
Here the illumined minds of other men
Are beacons on a mountain peak uprising
Beyond our ken.
Here there is quiet, and the world about us,
Here there is wisdom foolish men must know.
The earth is dumb with suffering about us,
And I must go.
- Christmas Humphreys
Both Sides of the Circle
commonplace
"Without bravery, we will never be able to realize the vaulting scope of our own capacities. Without bravery, we will never know the world as richly as it longs to be known. Without bravery, our lives will remain small - far smaller than we probably want our lives to be."
- Jack Gilbert
How often I find you
then on your patio, pajamaed
and distressed, head thrown
back so your eyes can pick apart
not the darker version of myself
but the carousel of stars.
To you I am merely background.
You barely hear my voice.
Remember I am most vibrant
when air breaks my light.
Do something with your brokenness.
- David Hernandez
from Sincerely, the sky
a not unfamiliar phenomenon on the horizon of shimmering deserts."
- Vladimir Nabokov
