Inspiration

nothing she did

or said

 

was quite

what she meant

 

but still her life

could be called a monument

 

shaped in a slant 

of available light

 

and set to the movement 

of possible music​

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Judith Downing’s The Grandmother Cycle, excerpted by Carol Shields

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He had been seen out in the fields pointing an instrument at the sun, a device, they said, for measuring distances. He had been trying to measure the distance between earth and God.

-  The Masters, U.K Le Guin

 

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The silence continued. The child’s dream: There is no one else alive in the world but me. In all the world.

- Nine Lives - U.K Le Guin

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I know that sentience or intelligence isn’t a thing, you can’t find it in, or analyze it out from cells of a brain. It’s a function of the connected cells. It is, in a sense, the connection: the connectedness. It doesn’t exist.

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Sentience without senses. Blind, deaf, nerveless, moveless. Some irritability, response to touch. Response to sun, to light, to water, and chemicals in the earth around the roots. Nothing comprehensible to an animal mind. Awareness of being without object or subject. Nirvana.

- Vaster than Empires and More Slow - U.K Le Guin

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But will you drag civilization down into the mud? cried the shocked decent people, later on, and she had tried to explain to them that if all you had was mud, then if you were God you made it into human beings, and if you were human you tried to make it into houses where humans could live. But nobody who thought he was better than mud would understand.

- The Day Before the Revolution - U.K. Le Guin

 

A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skilful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well, - this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection and of sociality as a whole.

- 'The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia' - U.K. Le Guin

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Well, darkness has a hunger that's insatiable

And lightness has a call that's hard to hear

And I wrap my fear around me like a blanket

I sailed my ship of safety till I sank it

I'm crawling on your shores​

 

Closer to Fine, Indigo Girls

 

The bank took the land that Hartwells had owned since 1909. Hartwell was allowed to stay in the house for another year, as a rent-paying tenant. He found part-time work on a government road crew. Verna stayed in Denver, still working as a maid. After being apart from her husband for two years, she returned for Christmas. Hartwell ended his diary with a poem, attributed to a woman from Ridgewood, New Jersey, Eleanor Chaffee. He attached the poem to the last page of his diary, without additional comment.

We had a crystal moment

snatched from the hands of time,

A golden, singing moment

Made for love and rhyme.

What if it shattered in our hands

As crystal moments must?​

Better than earthen hours

Changing to lifeless dust.​

- Timothy Egan, The Worst Hard Time

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Tell me, is the rose naked or is that its only dress?

- Pablo Neruda

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For children are innocent and love justice, while most of us are wicked and naturally prefer mercy. 

- Gilbert K. Chesterton

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And so you see I have come to doubt

All that I once held as true

I stand alone without beliefs

The only truth I know is you

 

And as I watch the drops of rain

Weave their weary paths and die

I know that I am like the rain

There but for the grace of you go I

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Kathy’s Song, Simon & Garfunkel

 

The search may begin with a restless feeling, as if one were being watched. One turns in all directions and sees nothing. Yet one senses that there is a source for this deep restlessness; and the path that leads there is not a path to a strange place, but the path home. (‘But you are home,’ cries the Witch of the North. ‘All you have to do is wake up!’) The journey is hard, for the secret place where we have always been is overgrown with thorns and thickets of ideas, of fears and defenses, prejudices and repressions. The holy grail is what Zen Buddhists call our own ‘true nature’: each man is his own savior after all.

- Peter Matthieson

 

The fact that many a man who goes his own way ends in ruin means nothing… He must obey his own law, as if it were a daemon whispering to him of new and wonderful paths… There are not a few who are called awake by the summons of the voice, whereupon they are at once set apart from the others, feeling themselves confronted with a problem about which the others know nothing. In most cases, it is impossible to explain to the others what has happened, for any understanding is walled off by impenetrable prejudices. “You are no different from anybody else,” they will chorus, or, “there’s no such thing,” and even if there is such a thing, it is immediately branded as “morbid.” …He is at once set apart and isolated, as he has resolved to obey the law that commands him from within. “His own law!” everybody will cry. But he knows better: it is the law…The only meaningful life is a life that strives for the individual realization – absolute and unconditional – of its own particular law…To the extent that a man is untrue to the law of his being…he has failed to realize his life’s meaning.

- Jung

 

The only true paradise is paradise lost. 

- Proust

 

To be whole is to be part; true voyage is return.

- U.K. Le Guin

 

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

- Dickens

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Reach out your hand, if your cup be empty

If your cup is full, may it be again

Let it be known there is a fountain

That was not made by the hands of men

 

There is a road, no simple highway

Between the dawn and the dark of night

And if you go, no one may follow

That path is for your steps alone

 

Ripple, Grateful Dead

 

“What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.”

- Joseph Heller

 

I had some terrific experiences in the wilderness since I wrote you last - overpowering, overwhelming. But then I am always being overwhelmed. I require it to sustain life.

- Everett Ruess

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This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life - the distance I’ve traveled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel form - that I almost crashed the car. 

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- The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, Dennis Johnson

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“Then what is good? The obsessive interest in human affairs, plus a certain amount of compassion and moral conviction, that first made the experience of living something that must be translated into pigment or music or bodily movement or poetry or prose or anything that’s dynamic and expressive—that’s what’s good for you if you’re at all serious in your aims. William Saroyan wrote a great play on this theme, that purity of heart is the one success worth having. “In the time of your life—live!” That time is short and it doesn’t return again. It is slipping away while I write this and while you read it, and the monosyllable of the clock is Loss, loss, loss, unless you devote your heart to its opposition.” 

- The Catastrophe of Success, Tennessee Williams

 

There are no thoughts but the heart’s hard turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times.

- Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard

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So I took what I wanted and put it out of my reach

I wanted to pay for my successes with all my defeats

And if Heaven was all that was promised to me

Why don't I pray for death?

 

When My Time Comes, Dawes

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At such a time you felt the need of committing yourself to something absolute - life or truth or beauty - of being ruled by it in place of the man-made rules that had been discarded. You needed to surrender to some such ultimate purpose more fully, more unreservedly than you had ever done in the old familiar, peaceful days, in the old life that was now abolished and gone for good.

 

- Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

 

Nothing to keep, nothing to lose. No possessions, no security, no concern about possessions, and no concern about security: in this mood it is possible to do exactly what makes sense, and nothing else; there are no hidden fears, no morals, no rules, no undercurrent of constraint, no subtle sense of concern for the form of what the people around you are doing, and above all no concern for what you are yourself, no subtle fear of other’s people ridicule, no subtle train of fears which can connect the smallest triviality with bankruptcy and loss of love and loss of friends and death, no ties, no suits, no outward elements of majesty at all. Only the laughter and the rain. 

- Christopher Alexander