Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
Instructions for living a life. Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.
Listen--are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?
I believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed.
You must not ever stop being whimsical. And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
I want to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.
Hello, sun in my face. Hello you who made the morning and spread it over the fields...Watch, now, how I start the day in happiness, in kindness.
I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.
Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.
The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.
You can have the other words-chance, luck, coincidence, serendipity. I'll take grace. I don't know what it is exactly, but I'll take it.
Still, what I want in my life is to be willing to be dazzled— to cast aside the weight of facts and maybe even to float a little above this difficult world.
To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift. ){kind=small}
The Uses Of Sorrow (In my sleep I dreamed this poem) Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this, too, was a gift.
Poetry is a life-cherishing force. For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry.
Love yourself. Then forget it. Then, love the world.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.
Tell me, what else should I have done? Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon? Tell me, what is it you plan to do With your one wild and precious life?
It is better for the heart to break, than not to break.
"Snow was falling, so much like stars filling the dark trees that one could easily imagine its reason for being was nothing more than prettiness.
When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. --from WHEN DEATH COMES
I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.
Maybe death isn't darkness, after all, but so much light wrapping itself around us--
He is exactly the poem I wanted to write.
Said the river: imagine everything you can imagine, then keep on going.
It is a serious thing // just to be alive / on this fresh morning / in this broken world.
The stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds, and there was a new voice which you slowly recognized as your own
