My heart

My heart is so small
it's almost invisible.
How can You place
such big sorrows in it?
"Look," He answered,
"your eyes are even smaller,
yet they behold the world."

- Rumi

Just Lie Down

Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth,
a forgetting of the breath. 
Stress is an ignorant state. 
It believes that everything is an emergency. 
Nothing is that important. 
Just lie down.

- Natalie Goldberg

A Work of Fiction

As I turned over the last page, after many nights, a wave of sorrow enveloped me.
Where had they all gone, these people who had seemed so real?
To distract myself, I walked out into the night;
instinctively, I lit a cigarette.
In the dark, the cigarette glowed, like a fire lit by a survivor.
But who would see this light, this small dot among the infinite stars?
I stood a while in the dark, the cigarette glowing and growing small,
each breath patiently destroying me.
How small it was, how brief.
Brief, brief, but inside me now,
which the stars could never be.

- Louise Glück

What we lose

When I was young
I could speak to animals,
these days
I don't know what to say.

They used to sniff my ears,
but now
they smell my fear
and walk away.

- Kate Tempest

I am so tired of waiting

I am so tired of waiting.
Aren’t you,
for the world to become good
and beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
and cut the world in two —
and see what worms are eating
at the rind.

- Langston Hughes

I wrote this for you.

I need you to understand something.
I wrote this for you.
I wrote this for you and only you.
Everyone else who reads it, doesn’t get it.
They may think they get it, but they don’t.
This is the sign you’ve been looking for.
You were meant to read these words.

- Iain S. Thomas
From I Wrote This for You

One Source of Bad Information

There's a boy in you about three
Years old who hasn't learned a thing for thirty
Thousand years. Sometimes it's a girl.

This child had to make up its mind
How to save you from death. He said things like:
"Stay home. Avoid elevators. Eat only elk."

You live with this child, but you don't know it.
You're in the office, yes, but live with this boy
At night. He's uninformed, but he does want

To save your life. And he has. Because of this boy
You survived a lot. He's got six big ideas.
Five don't work. Right now he's repeating them to you

 - Robert Bly
From Morning Poems

We cast

We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand,
and it is no good moving from place to place to save things;
because the shadow always follows.
Choose a place where you won't do harm -
yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm,
and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine.

-  E.M. Forster
From A Room with a View

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
- Billy Collins

Pursuits

It is not that you want
to be the one to make prints
in the untrampled snow
It is that you want
to be in the snow
without having touched it
to be of  the snow
not beginning
Everywhere commerce
dictates the shapes
that move you along
that seat you at the table
far from the snow
far from the act
of not touching
It only gets worse
A girl’s gotta eat
And your hunger’s
not even your own

- Heather Christle

Home

Home, imagined, comes to be.
It is real, earlier than any other place,
but you can’t get to it unless your people show you how to imagine it—
whoever your people are.
They may not be your relatives.
They may never have spoken your language.
They may have been dead for a thousand years.
They may be nothing but words printed on paper,
ghosts of voices, shadows of minds.
But they can guide you home.
They are your human community.

- Ursula Le Guin
From The Operating Instructions

The world

The world is violent and mercurial--
it will have its way with you. 
We are saved only by love--
love for each other 
and the love that we pour into the art 
we feel compelled to share: 
being a parent; being a writer; 
being a painter; being a friend. 
We live in a perpetually burning building, 
and what we must save from it, all the time, is love.

- Tennessee Williams

What can I do

What can I do with my happiness? 
How can I keep it, 
conceal it, 
bury it 
where I may never lose it? 
I want to kneel as it falls over me like rain, 
gather it up with lace and silk, 
and press it over myself again.

- Anaïs Nin
From Henry & June

Lies I’ve told my 3 year old recently

Trees talk to each other at night.
All fish are named either Lorna or Jack.
Before your eyeballs fall out from watching too much TV, they get very loose.
Tiny bears live in drain pipes.
If you are very very quiet you can hear the clouds rub against the sky.
The moon and the sun had a fight a long time ago.
Everyone knows at least one secret language.
When nobody is looking, I can fly.
We are all held together by invisible threads.
Books get lonely too.
Sadness can be eaten.
I will always be there.

- Raul Gutierrez

Travel in Both Ways

The bigness of the world is redemption. 
Despair compresses you into a small space,
and a depression is literally a hollow in the ground.
To dig deeper into the self, to go underground,
is sometimes necessary,
but so is the other route of getting out of yourself,
into the larger world, into the openness
in which you need not
clutch your story and your troubles so tightly to your chest
Being able to travel in both ways matters, 
and sometimes the way back into the heart of the question 
begins by going outward and beyond.

- Rebecca Solnit
From The Faraway Nearby

Shut your mouth

Shut your mouth; open your eyes and ears. 
Take in what is there and 
give no thought to what might have been there 
or what is somewhere else. 
That can come later, 
if it must come at all. 

- C.S. Lewis
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life

I have to tell you

I have to tell you,
there are times when
the sun strikes me
like a gong,
and I remember everything,
even your ears.

- Dorothea Grossman

Do You

Do you wake up as I do, having forgotten
what it is that hurts or where, until you move?
There is a second of consciousness that is clean again.
A second that is you, without memory or experience,
the animal warm and waking into a brand new world.
There is the sun dissolving the dark,
and light as clear as music,
filling the room where you sleep
and the other rooms behind your eyes.
 - Jeanette Winterson

Everything

Everything in the world is beautiful,
but Man only recognizes beauty
if he sees it either seldom or from afar. 
Listen, today we are gods! 
Our blue shadows are enormous!
We move in a gigantic, joyful world!

-  Vladimir Nabokov

Happy

“Happy," I muttered, trying to pin the word down. 
But it is one of those words, like Love, 
that I have never quite understood. 
Most people who deal in words don’t have much faith in them 
and I am no exception – 
especially the big ones like Happy and Love and Honest and Strong. 
They are too elusive and far to relative 
when you compare them to sharp, mean little words 
like Punk and Cheap and Phony. 
I feel at home with these, because they’re scrawny and easy to pin, 
but the big ones are tough and it takes 
either a priest or a fool to use them with any confidence.

- Hunter S. Thompson
From The Rum Diary