Poems can be a doorway into another world. Each one, a simple arrangement of otherwise ordinary words, that together evoke presence, wonder, possibility. So here is an invitation to pause, let the words wash over you and glimpse the world they offer you…
It’s a growing collection, and we’d love to hear which ones resonate with you and why, and find out about your favourites. Here is an index of our Words of Wonder.
I’ve learned to live simply, wisely, To look at the sky and pray to God, And to take long walks before evening To wear out this useless anxiety. When the burdocks rustle in the ravine And the yellow-red clusters of rowan nod, I compose happy verses About mortal life, mortal and beautiful life. I return.…
Finally on my way to yes I bump into all the places where I said no to my life all the untended wounds the red and purple scars those hieroglyphs of pain carved into my skin, my bones, those coded messages that send me down the wrong street again and again where I find them…
Vijaya – Victor When everyone else was meditating, I’d be outside circling the hall. Finally I went to confess. I’m hopeless, I said. The elder nun smiled. Just keep going, she said. Nothing stays in orbit forever. If this circling is all you have, why not make this circling your home? I did as she…
Bird at the top of the world, who knew it would come to this? What are you singing? What are you singing for? Perhaps you just can’t help yourself. Over the entire hemisphere your flute-phrases fall, announcing spring again – our northern spring, stirring deep and dark within bare forests, advancing across plains toward great…
To pray you open your whole self To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon To one whole voice that is you. And know there is more That you can’t see, can’t hear; Can’t know except in moments Steadily growing, and in languages That aren’t always sound but other Circles of motion. Like eagle that…
Contemplation on No-Coming and No-Going This body is not me. I am not limited by this body, I am life without boundaries. I have never been born, and I have never died. Look at the ocean and the sky filled with stars, manifestations from my wondrous true mind. Since before time, I have been free.…
Have you ever seen anything in your life more wonderful than the way the sun, every evening, relaxed and easy, floats toward the horizon and into the clouds or the hills, or the rumpled sea, and is gone– and how it slides again out of the blackness, every morning, on the other side of the…
In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake, coming back to this life from the other more secret, moveable and frighteningly honest world where everything began, there is a small opening into the new day that closes the moment you begin your plans. What you can plan is too small for you to…
Each day before our surroundings become flat with familiarity and the shapes of our lives click into place, dimensionless and average as Tetris cubes, before hunger knocks from our bellies like a cantankerous old man and the duties of the day stack up like dishes and the architecture of our basic needs commissions all thought…