Favorite Poems & Outakes

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack in everything;

that's how the light gets in

- Leonard Cohen

Every single human being you pass today is fighting to find peace and push back fear;

to get through their daily tasks without breaking down in the produce section

or in the carpool line

or at the post office -

Everyone around you is grieving - experiencing the collateral damage of living -

go easy.

- John Pavlovitz 

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic.  It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.  

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives.  If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something.  If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.

And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future.  The future is an infinite succession of presents and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.

 - Howard Zinn

...The world is indeed full of peril, and in it there are many dark places; but still there is much that is fair, and though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater...

 - J.R.R. Tolkien

...perhaps everything that frightens us,

is in its deepest essence,

something

that wants our love

- Rainer Maria Rilke

"Keep in mind that the transformation...is not about going from being a bad person to being a good person.  It is a process of getting smarter about what helps and what hurts; what de-escalates suffering and what escalates it; what increases happiness and what obscures it.  It is about loving yourself so much that you don't want to make yourself suffer anymore." 

(excerpted from article "Pema Chodron, 4 Keys to Waking Up" by Andrea Miller in Shambhala Sun March 2014)

We navigate by stories, but sometimes

we only escape by abandoning them.

 - Rebecca Solnit

Suffering is the thought:  THIS ISN'T IT.

Wisdom is the thought:  WHAT IS THIS?

 - John Tarrant

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain

 - Unknown

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the praries and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

-  Mary Oliver (Dream Work)

The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice -

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

"Mend my life!"

each voice cried.

But you didn't stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world,

determined to do

the only thing you could do -

determined to save

the only life you could save.

- Mary Oliver (Dream Work)

just swim,

just swim,

go on with your story.

- Suzuki Roshi