It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear. She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains, the long winding road crossing forests and villages. And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter there seems nothing more than…
Though the air is full of singing my head is loud with the labor of words. Though the season is rich with fruit, my tongue hungers for the sweet of speech. Though the beech is golden I cannot stand beside it mute, but must say ‘It is golden,’ while the leaves stir and fall with…
This morning as I walked along the lakeshore, I fell in love with a wren and later in the day with a mouse the cat had dropped under the dining room table. In the shadows of an autumn evening, I fell for a seamstress still at her machine in the tailor’s window, and later for…
In all ten directions of the universe, there is only one truth. When we see clearly, the great teachings are the same. What can ever be lost? What can be obtained? If we attain something, it was there from the beginning of time. If we lost something, it is hiding somewhere near us. Look: this…
It is possible, I suppose that sometime we will learn everything there is to learn: what the world is, for example, and what it means. I think this as I am crossing from one field to another, in summer, and the mockingbird is mocking me, as one who either knows enough already or knows enough…
That day I saw beneath dark clouds, the passing light over the water and I heard the voice of the world speak out, I knew then, as I had before, life is no passing memory of what has been nor the remaining pages in a great book waiting to be read. It is the opening…
After Derek Mahon Your great mistake is to act the drama as if you were alone. As if life were a progressive and cunning crime with no witness to the tiny hidden transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely, even you, at times, have felt the grand array; the…
There is nothing more innocent than the still-unformed creature I find beneath the soil, neither of us knowing what it will become in the abundance of the planet. It makes a living only by remaining still in its niche. One day it might struggle out of its tender pearl of blind skin with a wing…
Clouds are flowing in the river, waves are flying in the sky. Life is laughing in a pebble. Does a pebble ever die? Flowers grow out of garbage, such a miracle to see. What seems dead and what seems dying makes for butterflies to be. Life is laughing in a pebble, flowers bathe in the…