Poetry

  • Mary Oliver, Wild Geese

    You do not have to be good.

    You do not have to walk on your knees
    for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

    You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

    Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

    Meanwhile the world goes on.

    Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes,

    over the prairies and the deep trees,
    the mountains and the rivers.

    Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again.

    Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
    the world offers itself to your imagination,

    calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting– over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

  • Rilke, Excerpt from Love Poems to God

    If we surrendered
    to earth’s intelligence
    we could rise up rooted, like trees.

    Instead we entangle ourselves
    in knots of our own making
    and struggle, lonely and confused.

    So like children, we begin again...

    to fall,
    patiently to trust our heaviness.
    Even a bird has to do that
    before he can fly.

  • Rilke, Book on Love

    Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue.

    Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything.

    Live the questions now.

    Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

Rumi

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

When you do things from your soul, you feel a river moving in you, a joy.

- Rumi

To the mind that is still, the whole universe surrenders.

- Lao Tzu

"Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. it will not lead you astray.

- Rumi

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again...

to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

- Rilke

Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

- Rilke

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms...”