I am standing upon the seashore.A ship at my side spreads her whitesails to the morning breeze and starts for the blue ocean. She is an object of beauty and strength.I stand and watch her until at lengthshe hangs like a speck of white cloudjust where the sea and sky cometo mingle with each other….
Rest not!Life is sweeping bygo and dare before you die.Something mighty and sublime,leave behind to conquer time.— Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Goethe once wrestled with the desire to accomplish great things while enjoying the comforts of a bourgeois lifestyle. By all accounts he succeeded in transcending the ordinary with his writing. And what of us?…
When a friend calls to me from the roadAnd slows his horse to a meaning walk,I don’t stand still and look aroundOn all the hills I haven’t hoed,And shout from where I am, What is it?No, not as there is a time to talk.I thrust my hoe in the mellow ground,Blade-end up and five feet…
“Again, we are daily forced to choose between depression and anxiety. Depression results from the wounding of the individuation imperative; anxiety results from moving forward into the unknown. That path of anxiety is necessary because therein lies the hope of the person to more nearly become an individual. My analyst once said to me, “You…
“I try to be good but sometimes a person just has to break out and act like the wild and springy thing one used to be. It’s impossible not to remember wild and want it back.” — Mary Oliver, Green, Green is My Sister’s House If we’re lucky, we never really grow up, we just…
“Books and books and books—some five hundred volumes in all. Books of the sea and books of the land, some of them streaked with salt, collected with love and care over more than twenty-five years.Melville, Conrad, London, Stevenson; Gauguin and Loti and Rupert Brooke; Lubbock, Masefield, De Hartog—Slocum and Rockwell Kent; Trelawny and Cook and…
Star and coronal and bellApril underfoot renews,And the hope of man as wellFlowers among the morning dews.— A. E. Housman, Spring Morning Spring in the air, with a twist of biting cold thrust like a knife into the gut to keep you on your toes. That’s April in New England—best to appreciate the brief moments…
Watch the man beating a rug. He is not mad at it. He wants to loosen the layers of dirt. Ego accumulations are not loosened with one swat. Continual work is necessary, disciplines. — Rumi We’re all on our journey of becoming. We’re all working to grow in our chosen work, to experience life more…
Does a drop stay still in the ocean? Move with the entirety and with the tiniest particular. Be the moisture in an oyster that helps to form one pearl.— Rumi We are all drops in the infinite ocean, part of the whole yet trying to make a splash. Why do we focus so much on…
“If there seems to be no communication between you and the people around you, try to draw close to those things that will not ever leave you. The nights are still there and the winds that roam through the trees and over many lands.” — Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet We’re often…
