riverbird

"When it hurts we return to the banks of certain rivers." Czesław Miłosz, from I Sleep A Lot "Not seeing rivers is also another way of dying." Etel Adnan, from Sea and Fog

"But maybe the wind is supposed To blow right through you; Maybe you’re a tree in winter And your poem translates That cold wind into song." Gregory Orr

"Even now, when the plot  calls for me to turn to stone,  the sun intervenes. Some mornings  in summer I step outside  and the sky opens  and pours itself into me  as if I were a saint  about to die. But the plot  calls for me to live,  be ordinary, say nothing  to anyone. Inside the house  the mirrors burn when I pass." Lisel Mueller, There Are Mornings

"All voices should be read as the river's mutterings." Alice Oswald, Dart

"early fall exists; aftertaste, afterthought; seclusion and angels exist; widows and elk exist; every  detail exists; memory, memory’s light; afterglow exists; oaks, elms, junipers, sameness, loneliness exist; eider duck, spiders, and vinegar exist, and the future, the future" Inger Christensen, from "Alphabet" (trans. Susanna Nied)

“In England Have My Bones White wrote one of the saddest sentences I have ever read: ‘Falling in love is a desolating experience, but not when it is with a countryside.’ He could not imagine a human love returned. He had to displace his desires onto the landscape, that great, blank green field that cannot love you back, but cannot hurt you either.” Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“Method for understanding images, symbols, etc. Not to try to interpret them, but to look at them till the light suddenly dawns.  Generally speaking, a method for the exercise of the intelligence, which consists of looking.” Simone Weil, Attention and Will “When we first begin to believe anything, what we believe is not a single proposition, it is a whole system of propositions. (Light dawns gradually over the whole.)” Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty 

"The world cannot be translated; It can only be dreamed of and touched." Dejan Stojanovic, The Creator, “World II"

"I am writing to you from the end of the world. You must realize this. The trees often tremble. We collected the leaves. They have a ridiculous number of veins. But what for? There’s nothing between them and the trees any more, and we go off troubled.  Could not life continue on earth without wind? Or must everything tremble, always, always?" Henri Michaux, from I Am Writing to You from a Far-off Country