Solo Utah, October 2001
Is poetry a function of unhappiness or dissatisfaction?
What artist created these spires and sculptures? The wind did.
I love the sun for making the shade possible.
"Freeway" is doublespeak.
Is it possible to be wild in the city?
If you think the road is bad now, just wait. It gets worse. If you’re nervous about the trail ahead, having seen roughness at the outset, turn back. If you dislike hubris, assertion, and strong opinions--whether praise-song or damnation--stop reading.
"I will not be sad in this world." Who said that?
Mountains have spines and ribs. Do they have viscera?
The most beautiful line between two points is anything but straight.
I’ve gotten to first base with the Escalante. She let me kiss her on our first date, and I could see something good but she wouldn’t let me touch it.
This is just practice.
There’s something beyond each so-called dead end.
What happens to constellations during the daytime? The same thing that happens to my love when I am gone.
What is the right amount of excitement?
Why go anywhere else but here?
The Grand Canyon started with someone peeing.
This land...inspires not poetry but philosophy. I suddenly realize how fervently religious people may feel compelled to proselytize.
Yee hah! I’m free to me be. Whoever the hell that is.
A thing’s beauty is inversely proportionate to the number of times it’s been experienced by humans.
Canyons. How can anything so huge, so vast, be so hidden? They’re unfathomable. Canyons are God. I want to get to the bottom of this. Canyons are riddles. This place is riddled with canyons.
What is "behind"?
A book is a trailhead.
The way is so serpentine that I meet myself coming back.
Good clean red dust.
The principle of cairns... can be summarized: "Humans have been here." Thus, "Never fear." Also: "Here’s the way to get to a place." And, importantly, "here’s the way home."
Shaving is barbarous.
I’m feeling pre-besieged.
Where does poetry go when it goes missing?
I’ve been scribbling in a composition book that has spaces on its cover for name, school, and grade. I’m in the 41st grade.
I want to talk with ravens.
Life is full of chockstones to be surmounted... or bypassed.
The way is not always a visible way.
I shit, therefore I am.
What is it that draws me to red rocks, I wonder? A sort of magnetism? Maybe so. And what is it that causes me to draw breath.
What kind of rocks are they? I don’t know, but it’s not gneiss.
I’m practicing getting old.
It just dawned on me again: Nature rules.
Divining mysteries takes time. Give yourself some. Let your eyes adjust to the dim light of shadows. Lift stones and logs. Kneel. Examine the contents of nature’s closets, drawers, and medicine chests.
I like a place where a cryometer makes more sense than a thermometer.
The same spirit that courses through this river also runs through the blood in George Bush’s veins and Saddam Hussein’s. And mine.
If I knew now that this would be my last day, I don’t think I’d hike three and a half miles to make phone calls. I’d watch the birds and listen to them. I’d build a fire, jot notes, sip coffee, sweep up dead flies. I’d do the dishes and put out more seed.
The rivers I’ve crossed--the Baptism, Manitou, and Caribou--all flow into Lake Superior. Toward what great lake do the river of my thoughts flow? Are we always to be looking through windows, gazing out, peering in? Windows suggest yearning, or at least separation. I want to be a human-sized window that connects instead of separating, a space that is a bridge between outside and in.
Connections hold our world together. To be cognizant of connections and attend to them--mend them, weave them, build them, see and share their beauty--is something in which I fervently believe.
Freedom. It’s something to think about. The individual urge to grow and blossom freely. Some forms of freedom are better understood than others. They’ve been legislated (in some instances), written about, and fought over. But other freedoms, perhaps smaller somehow, are as important as vitamins and minerals in a diet. Is freedom to be ourselves the most basic freedom? Believing in something one knows not to be true: This isn’t freedom, but license. Yet this is entirely human: to believe things one knows are not true, to know something is wrong and do it anyway.
The freedom to choose what not to read, what not to watch, what not to say, what not to do: These are as important as the freedom to read, freedom of expression, and freedom of movement. The freedom to abstain--whether from voting, drinking, speaking, eating something, or going somewhere particular--is an integral freedom. But "failure to act" is licentious in cases where dire harm is being done and one chooses to avert one’s eyes.
The freedom to laugh at any time: This is another basic freedom. The freedom to love everyone. The freedom to take one’s time. The freedom to ponder. The freedom to dream. All these are basic to dignity and sanity. As is the freedom to impeach. Any society that claims to be based on freedom, yet puts people to death judicially is not free.
And what about freedoms from? Freedom from coercion and tyranny. Freedom from pollution.
I’m temporarily and relatively free, here and now.
The wind blows new snow, the sun drops hints about maybe coming out. It’s the greatest show on earth.
I’m viewing works in the permanent collection. Life for humans strings together baubles such as these.
Lichen targets. Branches pointing the way. Rivers relentlessly, if flexuously, heading somewhere in particular. All these natural signs direct us explicitly: Here!
Life is an adjustment from the start. We're all born without fingers on one hand in some sense. What do we transcend? What do we lose as we go along?
To be fully present, with mind and senses alive, awake and aware, leads to empathetic feeling. And then what? Then one watches out for the well-being of others, including birds, without analyzing why.
All the birds I've seen today are beautiful. Each species is special, differently wonderful. Wonderfully different.
If our instincts are good, and if we are well trained, we can be thoughtless and unintentionally good ourselves, filled with spirit and reflecting clearly any light that comes our way.
What about a permanent vacation?
Sense of awe and wonder. Sense of shape. Sense of distance and physical positioning. Sense of apprehension. Sense of humor. Sense of relief. Of whimsy. Sense of relationships, patterns, how things are-- or might otherwise be-- connected. Memory. Hunger. Surfeit. Sense of continuity, history (another kind of connectivity). Sense of ancestry. Of home. Sense of what matters. What is real. What is necessary. What's enough. Who said that there are five senses?
How can we remain elastic as we age? Children are fresh rubber bands. Old people eventually become the kind holding together a deck of cards that hasn't been used for years. Answer: Keep moving, keep stretching.
Outside the window now: snow floating upward like ashes from a fire. What is burning?
What lies ahead...? More mysteries, of course. Endless enigmas, boundless wonders, reassuring faces, unspeakable terrors. The river flows on. Night deepens. Seeds await.
I've been atop the highest peak in the state this week, crossed the highest falls, and beheld the earth's biggest lake. So what? I want to know more than surfaces. Not just connect the dots from branch tip to root end, but to know from without to within, animal, vegetable, mineral. My curiosity is inexhaustible. I want to gnaw at the marrow of people, delve into their earth.
And what of this desire to know? We all have a private heart that remains unknowable to others, but I think it behooves us to give deeper of our kernels. We hold ourselves in so tightly we're strait jacketed. Unfurl! I say. Love yourself as you love others: with patience, attentiveness, and curiosity, aware that you are changing.
Weather me more weather.
That was a rose-breasted grosbeak I heard earlier. Now I spot it briefly, identifying it as it flies away. What does it mean to only know something as it departs?
One must have imagination--or faith--to sense anything at all beyond the line where sky meets sea.
We don’t need much, and so many of us have a cornucopia. Our senses are dulled by things we don’t need, things of dubious or limited value. Mass media, for example. Or any medium. Or anything massive, for that matter.
My church’s spires are tall white birches.
I wish, I wish, I wish. I wish to be wishless.
The shore isn’t the edge. It’s middle ground.
I’m a mental activist.
Prepare oneself for all contingencies. The unforeseen will still occur, thank gawd.
Searching for fuel is a primary human drive.
Fire is quenched. Sculpture crumbles. All of us are temporary laborers.
The way that can be mapped, described, or named is not the true way, because the way is always changing.
If this were a twenty-minute world, I’ve lived a happy life.
In a "Peanuts" strip, Linus once said, "I love mankind, it’s people I can’t stand." I feel just the opposite. I like people--amusing, beautiful, wise, sweet , bumbling, complex, simple, kind, warm, prickly people--especially one at a time, but as a whole, humans appall me.
Some people talk twice as loud as they need to. And twice as often.
Infants don’t cry without reason.
If not an island, each person is an I-land. And an Eye-land.
New York City is too crowded for my liking at this time.
What is the log in my own eye I cannot see?
Today my name is Cranky When Hot. Dutiful Son. Keeps in Touch With Distant Friends. Knish Eater. He Whose Name Changes. Dances With Words.
Apples, harps, eyebrows, weeds, chickens, heart strings. What do you make of these things?
My sister’s name is Captures Flies Inside With Her Bare Hand and Puts Them Outside.
[My brother-in-law]: Sees the World Through Chemist’s Eyes.
"Dead tree" is an oxymoron.
It’s no surprise to me that enlightenment would come to someone after forty days in the wilderness.
I’ve a nephew in Illinois whose name is Kisses Snakes.
I’m wide awake now. In a couple of hours I’ll be wide asleep.
Modify. Modulate. Moderate.
We’re all looking for someone who will understand. And the earth understands all.
Did Thoreau have warm chocolate chip cookie feelings for another person? Or just nuts and beans feelings?
I awaken at 7 a.m. Eastern Crow Time.
Many partings. Many returns.
Where there’s a weal, there’s a way.
Everything timeless, eternal, and old, oddly, is new. New because it’s always changing....
Everything new is dazzling. Each new year. Each new day. Each new moment. Every day is Ardor Day.
Prepare to meet thy mood.
No matter the ailment or conundrum, when in doubt, my self-prescription is silence, space and rest.
I’m thankful for everyone who slows me.
Do you ever talk with yourself? If so, who are the two people talking?
Imagine if deer were armed.
Darkness affects the perception of time. The silent darkness is seemingly timeless.
No one deserves less than my best. But many get it, I’m sorry to say.
Tired again? Time to retire.
The Spanish for jeweler is joyeria. Imagine a store that sells joy.
Applause at concerts is often for something other than what the musicians think. We clap because the music has stopped.
Friend, or faux friend?
All my life has been a getting ready.
"It’s an old novel." Oh, really?
"The gods delight in stillness," Thoreau wrote. So do I. Silence suits me fine. I could far more easily be deaf than blind. I have a jukebox in my mind."
The difference between left and right depends on which direction one faces. Face the opposite direction, and left and right change places.
To live is to face unending, often unanswerable questions. What is the minimum daily requirement for joy? Is childhood experience with religion sometimes a sort of inoculation? (A colleague of mine so theorizes.) Is there such a thing as too much equanimity? What is responsibility, exactly? To whom (and to what) am I ultimately responsible? I've been confronted with ultimatum after ultimatum. Endless ends. Infinite ultimata. What is frivolous? What is essential? Why do I feel a striving skyward, into the blue? To stand atop mountains? A feeling of "there is more"? Why do I feel a movement downward, gravity, pull of the earth, wanting less and less? Trees reach upward, higher, visible, at the same time they extend downward, deeper, hidden. Rooted and growing. Humans and trees are alike this way. I want to live closer to the ground -- and to the sky. Farther from dense human society, from human noise. More elementally. I've been down paths that ended badly. I've been disappointed, roughed up, learned some lessons. Now each day is a little lifetime of its own. I've been scared sacred.
Is it possible to know ecstasy and sobriety at once? It is.
In the woods, who knows what life I tread upon? And with my words, what risk?
Strong-willed people don't always know what they're doing. Teachers make mistakes. Spiritual advisors, elders, and steadfast friends aren't immune to turmoil and confusion.
Ice over a river. At the cusp of freezing and melting, both conditions exist at once. The frontier where they meet, that's what I wish to explore.
Order in disorder: the anarchy of wildflowers, there's a model. And...[a]narchy of the land. As if it were a good idea to try to govern it.
I’m an amateur, which is to say a lover.
Some nonpareil things: Song of a wood thrush...blue sky after ten days of gray, the season's first snow, scarlet berries, pileated woodpecker's flamboyant crest, sound of breakers, rush of a waterfall, profound absence of human noise, sunset light shows, re-engagement with long-missing friends, mystery of those who disappear, the mystery of how the dead still live, balm of knowing society's fashions can be safely spurned, boundless optimism of morning refreshed by sleep, smile from a stranger, jokes of nature, cool breezes after a hot spell, full bladder emptied, poem written, broken item repaired, new metaphor met, dirt cleaned from shoes, surfeit realized and heeded.
My wild name--my original, true, unchanging permanent name, if there is one, is recorded nowhere, and unpronounceable. Utah Phillips' given name is Bruce. I'm thinking about changing my name to Ned. As in Ned Ludd. As in NED, my father's initials. As in Ed Abbey's family's nickname for him. Ned as in nada + zed. Then I'll live happily ever after in my little Ned den.
Today I encountered a sign in the middle of the woods: YOU ARE HERE. Was I?
I’ve been a fool. And lived.
So many boundaries and borders, containing things that belong inside, keeping the outside world at bay. Skin--of fruits and animals, walls of a house, garden fences, countries, prisons. Where do you draw the line?
As if the sun really sets.
When winter arrives, it's time to close some shuttlecocks. More than once, I've had to do this with my own feelings. The water still flows, but to different places.
Let me serve you some of my homemade wine from this little Klein bottle.
Based on my breakfast preference, you might call me L’Raisin Bran Librarian.
To walk is to know.
Rational thinking is only partial thinking.
With me, what you don’t see is what you don’t get.
Loring Park is my daily salvation. Here, watching as a bird feeds oblivious to the feet of humans who pass nearby, I wonder what passes humans without our noticing.
Rough sandpaper my ear a little more, life.
I want to be present. To tend connections. To love widely. To enjoy without inhibition. To give generously. And to express freely, without self-censoring. I want to continue.
Not only do I not have all the answers, I'm still figuring out which questions need to be asked.
When does a groove become a rut?
One obstacle at a time.
Each trail can be a trial.
Is this the most peaceful place on earth? Am I on earth? I just want to stand here and soak it up. What is "it"?
Imagine the possibilities.
Every rock is Balanced Rock.
Each step is a pas de dieu.
Reality: what a drug!
There is nothing more silent than a soaring raven--until it speaks.
Be careful not to admire so intently and closely that you step on something else equally worth attention.
Salad, alas.
Humans: Are those the ones with the yellow abdomens?
This car has a tachometer. I’d rather it had an altimeter.
The road is an artery and I am a corpuscle.
What tolls do we [unconsciously] pay?
Are estuaries an eastern thing?
I am an exhile.
Alone is an oxymoron. Nowhere do I travel entirely alone.
No one knows I’m here. Not even me.
Climbing is an exercise in faith.
This very stone on which I step is Ktaadn to an ant.
The rain in Maine stays mainly in the brain.
Why isn’t New Hampshire called Blancmont?
Something there is that doesn’t love a blaze.
Neither owl nor mouse, but made of the substance that connects them, I’m a lucky man.
If my descriptions of what I’ve seen here are criticized chiefly because I’m an easy target, would that make me a landscapegoat?
What does it all mean? What to make of unexpected new vibrations and possibilities that present themselves?
What is there about Concord that we can disagree about?
A museum is a place to muse.
To write about or photograph some things is wrong. But there is no wrength to which some people won’t go.
How vulnerable can we allow ourselves to be? How honestly and openly can we speak? Can we communicate lovingly, do what needs doing, negotiate gently and honorably, give generously, laugh at ourselves, and accept a host of long silences, partiality, and emphatic noes? At times we humans lurch in the world with the gait and demeanor of Frankenstein's monster, terrifying kith and kin, no matter the purity of our hearts. Not that our hearts are entirely pure. All of us are mixed. In Maine, Minnesota, or Montreal, we climb small mountains every day and gaze out with curiosity and affection, then, having looked and pondered, gaining new perspective, we return to our roots.
Of course the sun doesn’t set. The earth devours it.
To ride waves one must hold on to nothing.
Timeless time is the very best kind.
How close shall we be?
You who have ears, hear my prayer.
Who is to say what dreams are possible?
Who isn’t a teacher?
I exult that there are dandelions.
Allan’s hummingbird, Clark’s grebe, Lucy’s warbler. Thus have some species been called by humans. Name me after a bird.
Of what use am I? I’m forced by circumstance to write these very words. They take the place of things I can’t this instant do. They take the place of wings.
An egress is a female eagle. The little ones are called egrets.
As if we need ask a raven what nationality it is or require a passport from a pileated woodpecker.
In my daily life there are those whose absence is a profound presence.
Espresso says bitter can be good.
Once you’ve acquired this taste can you give it away?
It’s time for new traditions.
Imagine Canada before it was Canadian.
Who are we when we sleep?
The difference between left and right depends on which direction one faces. Face the opposite direction and left and right change places.
Zero is a number. Nowhere is a place.
Silence is the same in every language.
All my life is in the ellipses.
I love the sky. A part of me lives there with my seven sisters.
What dreams come to those with their heads in the heavens?
Help me root out dead metaphors. Help me celebrate unexpected connection, unexpected happiness. Help me mourn unexpected severance, unexpected anguish. Help me watch the sky.
Can we sing praise of disconnection without being ironic?
I long to be.
Few are called, many are frozen.
Lose out, find out.
I am not the boss of all.
It’s good to be with people who reject cultural kitschification. Humans who keep languages alive. Poets. Thinkers. Listeners. Savers of seeds. Artisans. Guardians of strange, wild, beautiful public secrets.
If ever I’m killed by a cougar, if my heart is someday carved out and devoured, remember this: "He loved cats." Think this: "He knew some joy in his life. He knew some pain. He was privileged to see and smell the northern lights, and to walk on Hudson Bay."
I’d like to get my fingers on a digital camera.
Hunger drives wolf from woods.
Why am I pulled to the perimeters?
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst.
So many things I don’t know. Most of which I don’t even know I don’t know.
Binary thinking is infantile thinking. Wet-dry, hot-cold. There’s more to life than that.
Have I run out of good questions?
Is there such a thing as too much truth telling? If so, what times call for circumspection.
Could we make beautiful music together, a banjo-tuba duet?
Careless and carefree: Note the distinction.
We never know where the seeds of our words and actions may be carried. They may somehow latch onto a person we don't even know, like how a dog passing through weeds can catch burrs in its fur and transport them. Somehow, the seeds may take purchase in a bit of soil somewhere and germinate and grow without our knowing it.
"Maybe" seems such a tenuous word on which to pin faith.
I've glimpsed fields of flowers growing far away that looked so familiar.
None who have given and loved have done wrong.
We shouldn’t allow ourselves to sour.
The line about not casting pearls before swine seems to suggest that some humans don’t deserve the best effort and attention. I venture that everyone needs caring attention, but that none of us has the sole responsibility to provide unlimited care for any one person, much less for all. Even when it comes to families, we share responsibility. Our time and our energy is finite. We have ourselves to nurture and we have the gift of choice, the wonderful freedom to turn in the direction of our passions, enthusiasm, and toward the people and activities that uplift us, energize us, and allow us to grow and be more fully human.
To care both widely and locally, doing ones best to expect no results, can be challenging. Encouragement helps.
Trust your aspiration.
When we despair and feel forlorn, there's still worthwhile work waiting patiently for us, as long as we have brains, hearts, and hands. And when we breathe deeply and look up, when we re-engage in that work, knowing we're not alone, it can be like coming home.
I vow to keep my eyes and heart open. I want to live and foster life, to love and be loved, to give and to receive, to reflect light and to absorb darkness, continually, steadfastly, gratefully, with as much grace as I can muster, with all due seriousness, with joy, and with laughter.
For those to whom "heart" is an empty metaphor, let me be more clear. There must be a thousand flavors of love. I have felt love of the world--weltliebe--the sense of being a tiny, happy, integral part of a system of trees, rivers, mountains, ants, amoebae, humans, colors, sounds, and feelings. I have felt love of vocation, of feeling caught up rightly in the creative spirit that blurs distinction between work and play. I have felt familial love, unconditional caring that comes close enough to real understanding, the rays of which are a healing or protective balm.
I have known responsible love: caring, decent, compassionate, continuing feelings of mutuality, of being part of the same ecology, of putting myself in another’s shoes, in answering "yes" without asking why. I have known love that bears heaviness, empathy, and tolerance, slowly, patiently, without grudge. I’ve known love that hurts.
I have experienced loving friendships that have continued multilaterally over decades, love that does not assume anything other than that connection always continues, even during times of quietude, together-and-apart.
I have known love where there were sparks, laughter, good energy, inspiration, enlightenment, and great joy. I have felt the love of connecting each moment to the next, honestly, warmly, gently, openly, with those around, whoever they may be on a particular day. And I have seen reassuring love on even my darkest days: trees’ love of soil and sky, birds’ love of trees and pond, and egrets’ love of fish.
If there are some with whom I feel both calm and energized, in whose presence I feel more alive, awake, and aware--and there are--for this I am thankful.
What about self-love? Are we integrated? What is the status of the civil rights movement within?
Learn from Wapusk: Watch and listen quietly. Monitor balance. Wait patiently. Test the ice.
Wait patiently for nothing in particular.
Arctic insects, sled dogs, Colorado cougars, drinkers in the corner bar, pilgrims walking around Mount Kailash, poutine eaters, people struggling with illness, canyon wrens, proud mothers, those who are fathers in their imaginations only, all those who’ve been forsaken, all those who are found, we are all connected.
The world is large and we are small and our bodies ever-changing, tender, and mortal. Do we dare imagine otherwise?
When it comes to putting things off, I’m not a professional. I’m an amateurcrastinator.
In the event of an emergency, flight attendants will remind you that you should have listened to the emergency instructions.
Intimacy: In time I see.
One can exaggerate simplicity.
What is the complexion of complexity?
The word "suddenly" contains too many letters.
You can do more than you think.
Everything reminds me of everything. And why shouldn’t it?
True, truer, truest. Can distinctions be drawn between them?
What is the motivation of a tree?
The world’s biography might be told through the story of its injuries, one by one. Title it Each Ache.
Once I was nearly dollarless. Now I am dolorless.
Imagine dismayhem: havoc wreaked by those who are appalled.
I am an instrument requiring a musician more than I am a musician requiring an instrument.
I am a camera.
Merton went to the abbey. Abbey went to the abyss. We follow in the footsteps of so many.
Label me "resistant to labeling."
Where doesn’t matter. How matters.
All voices are a crying in the wilderness, hawks and ravens are songbirds, and some things are better left undead.
"Zealous" means full of zeal. What does "jealous" mean?
Give us too our indelicacies.
Ask the daughter of Dawn, one of a pair of smittens.
I may look alone but I do not see alone.
Who says rocks are not alive?
Who does housekeeping in the sky?
Don’t be afraid of slickrock. It’s not slick. It loves the lizards who live in its cracks. It loves you too, truly, madly, steeply.
Destination uncertain, in some nameless pilot’s hands, the future unfolds.
I feel positively one-derful.
Change is good, said the quarters to the dollar bill.
For sparrows, talk is cheep.
Nothing is exactly what it seems. A brighter light reveals a deeper mystery.
I make my way upward not by going straight, but by curving far away from where I want to go.
How old am I? Sometimes I seem perpetually seven. I’m old enough and young enough to do anything I want to do.
Enough of urban complaints. I’m becoming a canyon librarian. A riparian librarian. One of the wild humans with reference books in his pack: a feral librarian.
Soulfully slow is the way to go.
Keep an open mind. Open eyes. Open ears. Pay attention to joy-- and to suffering. Foster curiosity. Think for yourself. Walk. Be out of doors. Just sit. Read widely, and slowly. (Travel widely and slowly, too.) Ask questions. Listen. Ask more questions. Test assumptions. Keep testing. Trust instincts. Give freely. Don't expect anything. Look before you leap. Leap.
Sometimes just to say "here, see?" is heresy.
As if we can stop the rain from falling.
What is misfortune but a fortune that has yet to be discovered?
Let me die on a day in which I’ve seen red rock canyons, talked with a raven, heard a stream flowing over rocks, or seen the clarity of another’s eyes.
It’s always dawn on the leading edge.
Winsome, lose some.
Too much cleverness is a sign of wisdumb.
A tree cannot refuse to be a tree. What can we refuse?
Emergency? Emerge and see.
What is wrong with the willful world that it will not obey?
Am I going or coming?
Why this infatuation with numbers and counting?
Everything is related, but how? How close or distant? Through what do any two beings connect? Or is the connection direct?
What falls around us that we do not see?
Who knows what now will bring?
For whom was Artist’s Point named?
What does it mean to love?
What is essential?
Is there an end to mystery?
How can people live hemmed in by right angles, glass, and cement? What happens to the soul of a person daily assaulted by noise—the thumping bass of car stereos, the shriek of alarms and sirens, the babble of television, the drone of airplanes and helicopters, the chatter and idle sounds of neighbors who cannot remain silent?
What is the cumulative effect of having to contend with leers and rude comments each time one walks down a street?
What is a person obliged to do?
What does it mean to live fully and fearlessly, to relinquish the very idea of control? How can one’s words and deeds spring up as aptly as a yellow lady's slipper?
What is the gospel of Corvus Corax?
Under what conditions does the raven sing?
Every day is a good day for truth-seeking.
Everything is kin.
Everything—each word, step, breath, pulse, even each thought—has an effect. Gentle ripples, waves, destructive tsunami.
There’s something higher.
Packaging matters.
Nothing is ever entirely resolved or motionless.
We’re all a demographic of one.
The world is full of Tar Babies to which you may stick and never extricate yourself, and the planet has countless corners never before explored, never before loved, never before truly inhabited.
Like birds that flout political boundaries, humans who love winged creatures shouldn’t let themselves be stopped by fences. Birders Without Borders, unite.
There is a certain pleasure in self-chosen labor, even of the most apparently pointless kind.
To be empowered to make one’s own mistakes is a linchpin of sanity.
A body at rest for too long tends to decay.
A culture of trash and ugliness encroaches upon us. It needn’t be this way. Gaze at the sky, touch the trunk of a tree, walk on ice. In summer, swim in a pond and eat berries from a bush. We are still animals, fortunately, and surrounded each moment by possibility, the chance for beauty to reveal itself for an instant. If we are quiet and attentive, mysteries may unfold and the probability of miracles increases.
Life offers all an eternity of nows.
Perform thy task in life.
The world is full of cries for attention, as well as profound and beautiful silence that doesn’t ask anything, whose clear message, after all, is "leave me alone." Humanity’s greatest shortcoming is not its failure to heed the cries but its failure to hear the silence.
Let us mirror the grace of a soaring raven by watching it soar.
Let me resist ossification and classification. Let me resist taming. To no small degree, I need to be feral and free, not simply to throw open windows and doors, and let in fresh air. I need to live with my feet touching soil, not cement. I need to see living trees, not walls whose plaster is affixed to dead ones turned into boards. I need to consummate my love for curves. (Ninety-degree angles are wrong, not right.) And to keep moving and growing.