p

Ripeness

 

Ripeness is

what falls away with ease.

Not only the heavy apple,

the pear,

but also the dried brown strands

of autumn iris from their core.

 

To let your body

love this world

that gave itself to your care

in all of its ripeness,

with ease,

and will take itself from you

in equal ripeness and ease,

is also harvest.

 

And however sharply

you are tested -

this sorrow, that great love -

it too will leave on that clean knife.

 

     Jane Hirshfield

 

 

Stephen Wilder

q

When we talk about understanding, surely it takes place only when the mind listens completely - the mind being your heart, your nerves, your ears - when you give your whole attention to it.

     Krishnamurti

 

 

Stephen Wilder

p

I have lived on the lip

of insanity, wanting to know reasons,

knocking on a door. It opens.

I've been knocking from the inside.

 

Rumi (trans. by Coleman Barks and John Moyne)

 

 

Stephen Wilder

q

What misery to be afraid of death.

What wretchedness to believe only in what can be proven.

 

     Mary Oliver

 

Stephen Wilder

p

No, no, there is no going back.

Less and less you are

the possibility that you were.

More and more you have become

those lives and deaths

that have belonged to you.

You have become sort of a grave

containing much that was

and is no more in time, beloved

then, now, and always.

And so you have become a sort of tree

standing over a grave.

Now more than ever you can be

generous toward each day

that comes, young, to disappear

forever, and yet remain

unaging in the mind.

Every day you have less reason

not to give yourself away.

 

     Wendell Berry

 

Stephen Wilder

q

The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

Mahatma Ghandi

p

The Stones

 

I owned a slope full of stones.

Like buried pianos they lay in the ground,

shards of old sea-ledges, stumbling blocks

where the earth caught and kept them

dark, an old music mute in them

that my head keeps now I have dug them out.

I broke them where they slugged in their dark

cells, and lifted them up in pieces.

As I piled them in the light

I began their music.  I heard their old lime

rouse in breath of song that has not left me.

I gave pain and weariness to their bearing out.

What bond have I made with the earth,

having worn myself against it?  It is a fatal singing

I have carried with me out of that day.

The stones have given me music

that figures for me their holes in the earth

and their long lying in them dark.

They have taught me the weariness that loves the ground,

and I must prepare a fitting silence.

 

Wendell Berry

 

Stephen Wilder