A bunch of wildflowers

You've traveled up ten thousand steps in search of the Dharma.
So many long days in the archives, copying, copying.
The gravity of the Tang and the profundity of the Sung
make heavy baggage.
Here! I've picked you a bunch of wildflowers.
Their meaning is the same
but they're much easier to carry.

-Master Hsu Yun

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Poem - Wendell Berry - The Peace of Wild Things

The Peace of Wild Things
— Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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"I dream of a quiet man who explains nothing and defends nothing, but only knows where the rarest wildflowers are blooming, and who goes, and finds that he is smiling not by his own will."

-Wendell Berry, from II, Sabbaths 1999, in "Given"


Some of his most awesome books:
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

Wendell Berry

"I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief... For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free."

~ Wendell Berry

Some of his most awesome books:
The Selected Poems of Wendell Berry
A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems 1979-1997
Wendell Berry and the Cultivation of Life: A Reader's Guide
The Mad Farmer Poems
The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture

"As a poet, I hold the most ancient values on earth. They go back to the late Paleolithic: the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying initiation and rebirth, the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe. I try to hold both history and wilderness in mind, that my poems may approach the true measure of things and stand against the unbalance and ignorance of our times."--Gary Snyder, A Controversy of Pets.

"The man who does not know nature, who does not walk under the leaves as under his own roof, is partial and wounded. I say this even as wilderness and our indifference, Nature there will always be, but it will not be what we have now, much less the deeper fields and woodlands many of us remember from our childhood. The worlds of van Gogh and Turner and Winslow Homer, and Wordsworth too, and Frost and Jeffers and Whitman, are gone, and will not return. We can come to our senses yet, and rescue the world, but we will never return it to anything like its original form."

--Mary Oliver, Winter Hours: Prose, Prose Poems, and Poems

Car Stevens: Morning Has Broken (lovely video!)

from Cormac McCarthy, The Crossing:

They were running on the plain harrying the antelope and the antelope moved like phantoms in the snow and circled and wheeled and the dry powder blew about them in the cold moonlight and their breath smoked palely in the cold as if they burned with some inner fire and the wolves twisted and turned and leapt in a silence such that they seemed of another world entire…Then he saw them [the wolves] coming. Loping and twisting. Dancing. Tunneling their noses in the snow. Loping and rising by twos in a standing dance and running on again…He could see their almond eyes in the moonlight. He could hear their breathe. He could feel the presence of their knowing that was electric in the air. They bunched and nuzzled and licked one another. Then they stopped. They stood with their ears cocked. Some with one forefoot raised to their chest. They were looking at him. He did not breathe. They stood. Then they turned and quickly trotted on. When he got back to the house Boyd was awake but he didn’t tell him where he’d been nor what he’d seen.

buy this book: The Crossing

08.29.08 - Wilderness

"I live in the woods out of necessity. I get out of bed
in the middle of the night because it is imperative
that I hear that silence of the night, alone, and, with
my face on the floor, say psalms, alone, in the
silence of the night.
...the silence of the forest is my bride and the sweet
dark warmth of the whole world is my love and out
of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that
is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the
secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their
beds all over the world.
-Thomas Merton, Dancing in the Water of Life, 240.