Love Expands

Life is short. But desire, desire is long.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

Words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.

In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.

In order to gain anything, you must first lose everything

How fragile we are, between the few good moments.

The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.

Something looks back from the trees,and knows me for who I am.

There are openings in our lives of which we know nothing.

When I write, I don’t know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

One recurring dream, many others have also: you go into a familiar house, discover a door or hallway, and find the house continues into hidden rooms. Sometimes a whole second house is there, a larger and unknown extension of the familiar dwelling.

Poems’ deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.

Immensity is always there, but we so often become numb to it, or deceive ourselves into thinking our own lives and selves are what’s large. Step into the ocean or walk on Mount Tamalpais, and that kind of amnesia and self-centeredness isn’t possible. Enter the natural world at all, you see existence emerge, ripen, fall and continue, and you can’t help but feel more tender towards self and others. That summoning into the large and the shared is what poems exist also to do.

It’s more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.

I travel as much as I do. It isn’t the life I expected. I don’t know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I’ve been given into other places and others’ lives.

I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don’t leap into my mind when I’m distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.