Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again painting their black silhouettes on an open sky.
Sometimes everything has to be inscribed across the heavens so you can find the one line already written inside you.
Sometimes it takes a great sky to find that first, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom in your own heart.
Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out
someone has written something new in the ashes of your life.
You are not leaving. Even as the light fades quickly now, you are arriving.
David Whyte
“Once upon a time, in some out of the way corner of that universe which is dispersed into numberless twinkling solar systems, there was a star upon which clever beasts invented knowing. That was the most arrogant and mendacious minute of ‘world history’, but nevertheless, it was only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths, the star cooled and congealed, and the clever beasts had to die.” So said Friedrich Nietzsche at the end of the 18th century.
To find oneself wholly lost to the world is to be fully present, and to be fully present is to accept that we may never know who we are and where we came from, especially when our radiant energy particles, our very flesh and blood are always in motion. When we refuse to accept the ebb and flow of our lives we suffer, when we can let go of this uncertainty we gain humility, wisdom. Wherever we find ourselves at any given moment, facing whatever is in front of us, is our way. There are no detours nor shortcuts. We can’t lose our way no matter how hard we try because we are already on our path and carry the light of the universe within us.
As the sky began to slowly fade from midnight black to navy blue, after what I hope will be the last rainstorm of the season, I pulled some poetry books off my shelf and randomly opened their pages, finding exactly what I needed to read.
from A Rose for Solitude II by Sam Hamill
This life of ours, this fleeting moment we are given – we enter it stunned never to learn how to perceive it. If we could only touch the things of this world at their center, if we could only hear the tiny leaves of birch struggling toward April, then we could know…
In memory of a gifted poet, translator and friend.
