I feel a little alarmed when it happens that I have entered a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there in spirit. What business have I in the woods if I am thinking of something outside the woods?
Thoreau, quoted in Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal
photo james petts
Go forth on your path,
As it exists only through your walking
Saint Augustine, Sermon 169.
Everything has two endings – a horse, a piece of string, a phone call.
Before a life, air.
And after.
As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.
As some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking.
So it was when love slipped inside us.
As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
The heart’s actions
are neither the sentence nor its reprieve.
Salt hay and thistles, above the cold granite.
One bird singing back to another because it can’t not
Jane Hirshfield, born 1953, American poet: Come, Thief: Poems
photo brian robert marshall
When you are compassionate with yourself,
you trust in your soul,
which you let guide your life.
Your soul knows the geography of your destiny
better than you do.
John O’Donohue
Don’t go back over what has passed
Nor yearn for what is yet to be
What has passed has been abandoned
And the future is not yet here
The state of arising here and now
see it as it is, with insight
The Buddha, Majjhima Nikaya, 131
photo “mike” Michael L Baird
Settling, white dew
does not discriminate
each drop its home
Nishiyama Soin, 1605 – 1682, Japanese poet
photo devilal
