chelleon

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.   I learn by going where I have to go. We think by feeling. What is there to know?   I hear my being dance from ear to ear.   I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Of those so close beside me, which are you?   God bless the Ground!   I shall walk softly there,   And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?   The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;   I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. Great Nature has another thing to do   To you and me; so take the lively air,   And, lovely, learn by going where to go. This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.   What falls away is always. And is near.   I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.   I learn by going where I have to go.

I wanted to be sure to reach you; though my ship was on the way it got caught   in some moorings. I am always tying up   and then deciding to depart. In storms and   at sunset, with the metallic coils of the tide   around my fathomless arms, I am unable   to understand the forms of my vanity   or I am hard alee with my Polish rudder   in my hand and the sun sinking. To   you I offer my hull and the tattered cordage   of my will. The terrible channels where   the wind drives me against the brown lips   of the reeds are not all behind me. Yet   I trust the sanity of my vessel; and   if it sinks, it may well be in answer   to the reasoning of the eternal voices, the waves which have kept me from reaching you.

The U.S-Mexican border es una herida abierta where the Third World grates against the first and bleeds. And before a scab forms it hemorrhages again, the lifeblood of two worlds merging to form a third country — a border culture. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe, to distinguish us from them. A border is a dividing line, a narrow strip along a steep edge. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary. It is in a constant state of transition. The prohibited and forbidden are its inhabitants.

-- Galway Kinnell, Saint Francis and the Sow

And you O my soul where you stand, Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them, Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold, Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

--Philip Larkin

-- Bertolt Brecht, “The World’s One Hope”

Guarded by horned beak and nails, surrounded By mahogany carapace molded in tiles Like beveled wood, hidden within the hingeless Plastron, beneath twelve, yellow-splotched Black scutes, buried below the inner lungs And breast, harbored in the far reaches Of the living heart, there it exists, As it must, that particle of vulnerability, As definite in its place as if it were a brief glint Of steel, buried inside the body of the bog turtle. And it is carried in that body daily, like a pinpoint Of diamond in a dark pouch, through marshy fields And sunlit seepages, and it is borne in that body, Like a crystal of salt-light locked in a case Of night, borne through snail-ridden reeds and pungent Cow pastures in spring. It is cushioned and bound By folds of velvet, by flesh and the muscle Of dreams, during sleep on a weedy tussock all afternoon. It is divided and bequeathed again in June, protected By thick sap, by yolk meal and forage inside its egg Encompassed by the walls of shell and nest. Maybe I can imagine the sole intention present In the steady movement of turtle breath filled With the odor of worms this morning, stirring Clover moisture at the roots. Maybe I can understand How the body has taken form solely Around the possibility of its own death, How the entire body of the bog turtle Cherishes and maintains and verifies the existence Of its own crucial point of vulnerability exactly As if that point were the only distinct, Dimensionless instant of eternity ever realized. And maybe I can guess what it is we own, If, in fact, it is true: the proof of possession Is the possibility of loss. 

May with its light behaving Stirs vessel, eye and limb, The singular and sad Are willing to recover, And to each swan-delighting river The careless picnics come In living white and red. Our dead, remote and hooded, In hollows rest, but we From their vague woods have broken, Forests where children meet And the white angel-vampires flit, Stand now with shaded eye, The dangerous apple taken. The real world lies before us, Brave motions of the young, Abundant wish for death, The pleasing, pleasured, haunted: A dying Master sinks tormented In his admirers' ring, The unjust walk the earth. And love that makes impatient Tortoise and roe, that lays The blonde beside the dark, Urges upon our blood, Before the evil and the good How insufficient is Touch, endearment, look.

-- Bertolt Brecht

-- John Ruskin, from Love's Meinie, Lecture II

My work is loving the world. Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—     equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast there the blue plums. Here the clam deep in the speckled sand. Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young, and still not half-perfect? Let me     keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,  which is mostly standing still and learning to be     astonished. The phoebe, the delphinium. The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here, which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart     and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy     to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam, telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever.

Another morning and I wake with thirst for the goodness I do not have. I walk out to the pond and all the way God has given us such beautiful lessons. Oh Lord, I was never a quick scholar but sulked and hunched over my books past the hour and the bell; grant me, in your mercy, a little more time. Love for the earth and love for you are having such a long conversation in my heart. Who knows what will finally happen or where I will be sent, yet already I have given a great many things away, expecting to be told to pack nothing, except the prayers which, with this thirst, I am slowly learning.