The world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but by a spiritual journey a journey of one inch, very humbling and peaceful by which we arrive at the ground by our own two feet, and learn to be home within ourselves.
-Wendell Berry
Now the cricket is hurrying
His song. Is there yet more spring?
Whoever loses all this, loses himself.
So much green, and the field mine!
Heaven that the eye cannot fathom:
It is love that wins you.
Don’t I deserve such a morning?
My heart earns it.
-Jorge Guillén
Give me but one firm spot on which to stand, and I will move the earth.
-Archimedes
Just when we are safest, there’s a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one’s death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,–
And that’s enough for fifty hopes and fears
As old and new at once as nature’s self,
To rap and knock and enter in our soul.
-Robert Browning
What lifts the heron leaning on the air
I praise without a name. A crouch, a flare,
a long stroke through the cumulus of trees,
a shaped thought at the sky – then gone. O rare!
Saint Francis, being happiest on his knees,
would have cried Father! Cry anything you please
But praise. By any name or none. But praise
the white original burst that lights
the heron on his two soft kissing kites.
When saints praise heaven lit by doves and rays,
I sit by pond scums till the air recites
It’s heron back. And doubt all else. But praise.
-John Ciardi
My life closed twice before its close;
It yet remains to see
If Immortality unveil
A third event to me
So huge, so hopeless to conceive,
As these that twice befell.
Parting is all we know of heaven,
And all we need of hell.
-Emily Dickinson
And in the end, it’s not the years in your life that count. It’s the life in your years.
-Abraham Lincoln
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
I dream of journeys repeatedly:
Of flying like a bat deep into a narrowing tunnel
Of driving alone, without luggage, out a long peninsula,
The road lined with snow-laden second growth,
A fine dry snow ticking the windshield,
Alternate snow and sleet, no on-coming traffic,
And no lights behind, in the blurred side-mirror,
The road changing from glazed tarface to a rubble of stone,
Ending at last in a hopeless sand-rut,
Where the car stalls,
Churning in a snowdrift
Until the headlights darken.
-Theodore Roethke
God looked around His garden
And He found an empty place.
He then looked down upon this earth
And saw your tired face.
He put His arms around you
And lifted you to rest.
God’s garden must be beautiful;
He always takes the best.
He knew that you were suffering.
He knew you were in pain.
He knew that you would never
Get well on earth again.
He saw the road was getting rough,
And the hills were hard to climb.
So He closed your weary eyelids,
And whispered “Peace be thine”.
It broke our heart to lose you,
But you did not go alone.
For part of us went with you
The day God called you home.
-Anonymous