the most important things

"... as you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them - "ordinary things" is a better expression. That is the way the world is."
— Chaim Potok, from The Chosen

"One's relation to one's subject ceases to be merely emotional or esthetical, or even merely critical, and becomes problematical, practical, and responsible as well. Because it must. It is like marrying your sweetheart." - Wendell Berry

what to confess?

"I thought about what to confess, but I could not break my sense of being at fault down to its components. Trying to get a particular sin out of it was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of the line."

- Tobias Wolff, from This Boy's Life

for my dad

Sometimes, Dad, I still
want you to carry me
on your shoulders,
running like you did
when I was four.
Days like today, on
on which I feel
smaller than my five feet,
eleven inches. Your massive
frame bore my littleness.
I remember
after a tough day at
kindergarten I looked for
your rough-hewn stubble,
knew the warm feel against
my childish cheeks as
well as I knew the silence
of our woods -
knew our wrestling on the floor
of our little red cabin,
knew it was all I'd wanted
or even needed then.
I remember finding my voice,
high-pitched toward
the rafters, falling
to your chest.

(Sometimes I think of Mr. Gates
driving by in his truck,
the way I pretended
to chase him. We'd scowl
at each other seriously,
and I'd hide between your knees.)

Now I wrestle with myself:
my bag full of anthologies,
text books, collections of
death notes. My voice
wavers now, sometimes,
when I don't know
how to be a man.
It wavered
then, when you tossed me like
so many potatoes in a knapsack,
crashing into your shoulders,
but I knew your warmth then.
We fished by the pond
in golden light.

Now flooded with memory,
I wish I could bury myself under
the sun that has set on
my childhood, in the days
when you tossed me,
caught me, carried me.
How if, for a moment more
I could ask you
how to tie a fishing line,
how to throw a baseball,
how to pray,
how to love my grandfather dying and raging,
how to love a woman;
how to listen with the
unwavering
ears of a child. I'd be there
in our yard in a second,
running toward you.

passionate tenacity

"The passionate tenacity of hunters, woodmen, early risers, cultivators of gardens and orchards and fields, the love of healthy women for the manly form, sea-faring persons, drivers of horses, the passion for light and open air, all is an old varied sign of the unfailing perception of beauty and of a residence of the poetic in outdoor people.... The poetic quality is not marshalled in rhyme or uniformity or abstract addresses to things nor in melancholy complaints or good precepts, but is the life of these and much else and is in the soul."

- Walt Whitman (from the preface to Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.)

rilke in the afternoon

"And isn't the whole world yours? For how often you set it on fire with your love and saw it blaze and burn up and secretly replaced it with another world while everyone slept. You felt in such complete harmony with God, when every morning you asked him for a new earth, so that all the ones he had made could have their turn. You thought it would be shabby to save them and repair them; you used them up and held out your hands, again and again, for more world. For your love was equal to everything."
— Rainer Maria Rilke, from The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

good things

"Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or another book; give it, give it all, give it now. the impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better."
— Annie Dillard (The Writing Life)

Good advice for writing a book. Good words to live a life by. I hope.

a vulnerable mystic said

"Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among the mysteries."
— Theodore Roethke

fog

"Forbid yourself to judge life during these fog-bound times that allow you no sight of its sweeping panorama." - Rainer Maria Rilke