Just a soul trying to wake up

I think breakfast is sacred.
Even if you just stand
to watch the tea kettle boil.
Sunlit mornings and creaky steps
with oversized blankets
and soggy eyes
welcome another try at life.
It's dusty and quiet–
just a soul trying to wake up
and a cup of tea.

If it came down to doing just one thing

If it came down to doing just one thing, I would choose to sit, enjoy life, experience life, the sorrows and whatever else it may bring, and write about it.

Formula for a good life and a good community

Wendell Berry's formula for a good life and a good community is simple and pleasingly unoriginal. Slow down. Pay attention. Do good work. Love your neighbours. Love your place. Stay in your place. Settle for less, enjoy it more.

I am really here

I am sitting under a sycamore by Tinker Creek. I am really here, alive on the intricate earth under trees.

Lines from "Sometimes"

Sometimes
if you move carefully
through the forest,
breathing like the ones
in the old stories...

you come to a place
whose only task
is to trouble you
with tiny
but frightening requests...

...Requests to stop what
you are doing right now
and
to stop what you
are becoming
while you do it,
questions
that can make
or unmake
a life.... 

"The Man Watching"

...The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age...

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too,
and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us...

New capacity

...there are at least two ways to understand what it means to have our hearts broken. One is to imagine the heart broken into shards and scattered about — a feeling most of us know, and a fate we would like to avoid. The other is to imagine the heart broken open into new capacity — a process that is not without pain but one that many of us would welcome. As I stand in the tragic gap between reality and possibility, this small, tight fist of a thing called my heart can break open into greater capacity to hold more of my own and the world's suffering and joy, despair and hope.

A growing up

I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult...

Lines from "The Wildest Bet is the Winning Bet"

You wouldn't have bet on it,
the battered rock
orbiting a star
from the discount bin
of the universe,
wouldn't have guessed
that it would bloom
mitochondria and music,
that it would mushroom
mountains and minds,

and the hummingbird wing
whirring a hundred times faster
than your eye can blink...

...and the marbled orca
carrying her dead calf
down the entire edge
of the continent,
carrying the weight
of consciousness

and consciousness
how it windows

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