THE JOURNEY
- David Whyte

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

Painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
enscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

small, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving
you are arriving.

WHERE MANY RIVERS MEET
- David Whyte

Waking
Get up from your bed,
go out from your house,
follow the path you know so well,
so well that you now see nothing
and hear nothing
unless something can cry loudly to you,

and for you it seems
even then
no cry is louder than yours
and in your own darkness
cries have gone unheard
as long as you can remember.

These are hard paths we tread
but they are green
and lined with leaf mould
and we must love their contours
as we love the body branching
with its veins and tunnels of dark earth.

I know that sometimes
your body is hard like a stone
on a path that storms break over,
embedded deeply
into that something that you think is you,

and you will not move
while the voice all around
tears the air
and fills the sky with jagged light.

But sometimes unawares
those sounds seem to descend
as if kneeling down into you
and you listen strangely caught
as the terrible voice moving closer
halts,

and in the silence
now arriving
whispers
Get up, I depend
on you utterly.

Everything you need
you had
the moment before
you were born.

Examine all that you’ve been told. Dismiss what insults your soul, and your very flesh shall become a great poem.
- Walt Whitman

This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival: a joy, a depression, a meanness
some momentary awareness comes, as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all
even if they are a crowd of sorrows
who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture;
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
- Rumi

Wage Peace with your breath.
Breathe in firemen and rubble.
Breathe out whole buildings and flocks of red-wing blackbirds.
Breathe in terrorists
Breathe out sleeping children and fresh mown fields.
Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.
Breathe in the fallen and breathe out life long relationships intact.
Wage peace with our listening: hearing sirens, pray loud.
Remember your tools: flower seeds, clothing pins, clean rivers.
Make soup.
Play music; learn the word "thank you" in 3 languages.
Learn to knit: make a hat.
Think of chaos as dancing raspberries.
Imagine grief
as the outbreak of beauty or gesture of fish.
Swim for the other side.
Wage peace.

Never has the word seemed so fresh and precious.
Have a cup of tea and rejoice.
Act as if armistice has already arrived.
Celebrate today.

- Judyth Hill (this poem was widely and mistakenly attributed to the poet Mary Oliver.)

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
- Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

(i do not know what it is about you that closes and opens;
only something in me understands the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands
- ee cummings

love is a place
& through this place of
love move (with brightness of peace)
all places
yes is a world & in this world of yes
live (skillfully curled) all worlds

- ee cummings

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz, or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off. I love you as certain dark things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that never blooms but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers; thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance, risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body. I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where. I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride; so I love you because I know no other way than this: Where “I” does not exist, nor “You”, so close that your hand on my chest is my hand, so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

- Pablo Neruda, excerpt from 100 Love Sonnets