Mindful
by Mary Oliver

Every day
     I see or hear
         something
             that more or less

kills me
    with delight,
         that leaves me
              like a needle

in the haystack
     of light.
          It was what I was born for —
                   to look, to listen,

to lose myself
     inside this soft world —
         to instruct myself
                over and over

in joy,
      and acclamation.
             Nor am I talking
                   about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
       the very extravagant —
             but of the ordinary,
                   the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
      Oh, good scholar,
         I say to myself,
               how can you help

but grow wise
      with such teachings
          as these —
                the untrimmable light

of the world,
    the ocean’s shine,
          the prayers that are made
                 out of grass?

thepersonalquotes:

memoryslandscape:

“I made an effort to develop a mind of winter.”

— Teju Cole, from Open City (Random House, 2011)

010180000:

I want you to write for pleasure—to play. Just listen to the sounds and rhythms of the sentences you write and play with them, like a kid with a kazoo. This isn’t “free writing,” but it’s similar in that you’re relaxing control: you’re encouraging the words themselves—the sounds of them, the beats and echoes—to lead you on. For the moment, forget all the good advice that says good style is invisible, good art conceals art. Show off! Use the whole orchestra our wonderful language offers us! Write it for children, if that’s the way you can give yourself permission to do it. Write it for your ancestors. Use any narrating voice you like. If you’re familiar with a dialect or accent, use it instead of vanilla English. Be very noisy, or be hushed. Try to reproduce the action in the jerky or flowing movement of the words. Make what happens happen in the sounds of the words, the rhythms of the sentences. Have fun, cut loose, play around, repeat, invent, feel free.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Steering The Craft

mythologyofblue:

The bright side of the planet moves toward darkness
And the cities are falling asleep, each in its house,
And for me, now as then, it is too much,
There is too much world.

-Czeslaw Milosz, The Separate Notebooks

The Year 
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

What can be said in New-Year rhymes,
That’s not been said a thousand times?

The new years come, the old years go,
We know we dream, we dream we know.

We rise up laughing with the light,
We lie down weeping with the night.

We hug the world until it stings,
We curse it then and sigh for wings.

We live, we love, we woo, we wed,
We wreathe our brides, we sheet our dead.

We laugh, we weep, we hope, we fear,
And that’s the burden of the year.