If I could gear my mind to the year’s round,
take season into season without a break,
instead of feeling my heart bound and rebound
because of the full moon or the first snowflake,
I should have gained something.
John Hewitt, 1907 – 1967 Northern Irish Poet, O Country People
We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.
Katherine May, Wintering
Deep in their roots,
all flowers keep the light.
Theodore Roethke
I long for a small respite from the reaching, a moment of sweet stillness, quiet darkness, the great silence that can penetrate and loosen the small, hard knots of endless trying. I want to be willing and able to move only as fast as I am capable of moving while still remaining connected to the impulse to move from deep within, stopping when I have lost that slender thread of desire and having the courage and faith to wait, in stillness, until I find it again.
Oriah Mountain Dreamer
Don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others.
Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
we have opened you.
Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy and tired.
Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
Rumi
A bank Holiday here in Ireland.
What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?
Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970 British Philosopher
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