A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

You have traveled too fast over false ground;

Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up

To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain

When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,

Taking time to open the well of color

That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone

Until its calmness can claim you.

― John O'Donohue

Desert Places

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces

Between stars—on stars where no human race is.

I have it in me so much nearer home

To scare myself with my own desert places. 

― Robert Frost

thought flood

Tonight, in the infinitesimal light of the stars,

The trees and flowers have been strewing their cool odors.

I walk among them, but none of them are noticing.

Sometimes I think that when I am sleeping

I must most perfectly resemble them--

Thoughts gone dim.

It is more natural to me, lying down.

Then the sky and I are in open conversation,

And I shall be useful when I lie down finally:

Then the trees may touch me for once, and the flowers have time for me.

― Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems

...I Am Vertical

(But I would rather be horizontal...)

---

The Mystery Of Man

We come from a distant past that we’ve forgotten

And now we look up and aspire to the stars

We are the mystery that even we can’t decipher

The mystery of man

The story is told in stone and broken arrows

In traces of cities unknown lost in sand

In colours and castle walls silent and unseen statues

The mystery of man

The wind stirs in the trees likes voices in dreams

And then just when it seems we know what it means

Simply its gone

The miracle is the mind asking the questions

Seeking to find itself if it can

Only to see itself endlessly echoed in mirrors

The mystery of man.

---

Karol Wojtyla (the late Pope John Paul II)

finding the words

One day I will find the right words, and they will be simple. 

― Jack Kerouac

The Test

Those who learned to be truly human

found everything in being humble

while those who looked proudly from above

were pushed down the stairs.

A heart that must always feel superior

will one day lose its way.

What should be within leaks out...

A Poem by Yunus Emre (1240-1321)

The Drop that became the Sea, translated by Helminski and Algan (1989)

half light and dusk

[Photograph: T. Estacaan, "Half Light" May 2013]

“Although

the cricket’s song

has no words,

still,

it sounds like sorrow.”

— Ono no Komachi, in The Ink Dark Moon, translated by Jane Hirshfield