Words That Have Stayed With Me
“Without a sense of marvel at things, without wonder, one can’t create anything.”
— Jhumpa Lahiri
“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests for be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of wild species into zoos or extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence. . . And so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves. . .part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, brother to the other animals, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it.”
— Wallace Stegner
“Poetry is a free plant. It grows where no one has ever seeded it. The poet is simply the patient botanist who scales mountains to gather it.”
— Gustave Flaubert
“[A mystic is marked by ] an unbroken awareness of the presence of God in all creatures. The signs are clear: unfailing compassion, fearlessness, equanimity, and the unshakable knowledge, based on direct, personal experience, that all the treasures and pleasures of this world together are worth nothing if one has not found the uncreated light at the center of the soul.”
— Richard Rohr
“Plants know how to make food and medicine from light and water, and then they give it away.”
— Robin Wall Kimmerer
“You wake from dreams of doom and—for a moment—you know: beyond all the noise and gestures, the only real thing, love’s calm unwavering flame in the half light of an early dawn.”
— Dag Hammarskjold
“There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible. . .Reality, of which the visible things are the symbol, shines before my mind. While I walk about my chamber with unsteady steps, my spirit sweeps skyward on eagle wings and looks out with unquenchable vision upon the world of eternal beauty.”
— Helen Keller
“In the stark emptiness of winter, all that has been gussied up to be palatable and presentable is shown for what it is. The truth of our checkered past stares at us boldly, nakedly, unhidden. And yet, underneath the surface of this harsh, blistery reality, another truth is incubating, waiting to yield its fruit. Can we trust what’s there to offer us something we have not yet seen?”
— Felicia Murrell
"Our dreams have tamed the lions,/ have made pathways in the jungle,/ peaceful lakes; they have built new/ Edens ever sweet and ever changing./ By day from town to town we carry/ Eden in our tents and bring its wonders/ to the children who have lost/ their dream of home.”
— Robert Lax
…to be continued.
