RIP Mary Oliver

Last Days

Things are
     changing; things are starting to
          spin, snap, fly off into
               the blue sleeve of the long
                    afternoon. Oh and ooh
come whistling out of the perished mouth
     of the grass, as things
turn soft, boil back
     into substance and hue. As everything,
          forgetting its own enchantment, whispers:
               I too love oblivion why not it is full
                    of second chances. Now,
hiss the bright curls of the leaves. Now!
     booms the muscle of the wind.

~Mary Oliver

 

“Is it not enough, this blessed sip of life?”

How many wonderful moments must you experience before you declare your life wonderful? Ten thousand? A dozen? One? And how many of those must you be able to remember? The same number? Fewer? None? Does it matter whether you can recall it, that wonderful moment? Or just that it happened?

Teach us to sit still and not sit still

If you seek, how is that different from pursuing sound and form?
If you don’t seek, how are you different from earth, wood or stone?
You must seek without seeking.
~Wu-Men

“The truth is just like this.”

“He remembered waking once on such a night to the clatter of crabs in the pan where he’d left steakbones from the night before. Faint deep coals of driftwood fire pulsing in the onshore wind. Lying under such a myriad of stars. The sea’s black horizon. He rose and walked out and stood barefoot in the sand and watched the pale surf appear all down the shore and roll and crash and darken again. When he went back to the fire he knelt and smoothed her hair as she slept and he said if he were God he would have made the world just so and no different.”

~Cormac McCarthy, from The Road

The Kid swears IRL (I swear)

One Strange Rock

It is a miracle—a MIRACLE—that we are here, that this world is. Hard to imagine someone watching this series and not wanting to conserve our wondrous planet. If only we could all spend a few weeks in space to gain the perspective these astronauts achieved.

“The world breaks everyone…”

Long Day

“It’s not easy being green.”

“The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanly sensitive. To him, a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death. Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create—so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, his very breath is cut off from him. He must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency he is not really alive unless he is creating.”

~ Pearl S. Buck

Me Look Pretty One Day

“There’s the ideal beauty of youth and health, which never really changes, and is always true. There’s the ideal beauty of movie stars and advertising models, the beauty-game ideal, which changes its rules all the time and from place to place, and is never entirely true. And there’s an ideal beauty that is harder to define or understand, because it occurs not just in the body but where the body and the spirit meet and define each other.”

~Ursula K. Le Guin (from “Dogs, Cats, and Dancers: Thoughts about Beauty”)