upstream

• In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.
• I walk, all day, across the heaven-verging field.
• Come with me into the field of sunflowers is a better line than anything you will find here, and the sunflowers themselves far more wonderful than any words about them.
• My parents were downstream, not far away, then farther away because I was walking the wrong way, upstream instead of downstream...there I was, slopping along happily in the stream’s coolness. So maybe it was the right way after all. If this was lost, let us all be lost always.
• I do not think that I ever, in fact, returned home.
• It lives in my imagination strongly that the black oak is pleased to be a black oak.
• Do you know anything about where you live, what it offers?
• Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.
• We don’t matter so much, but the children do.
• Attention is the beginning of devotion.

my friend walt whitman

• the poem is a temple—or a green field—a place to enter, and in which to feel.
• the poem was made not just to exist, but to speak—to be company.

staying alive

• The scene is original and pretty as a dream. But I am wide awake.
• I believe everything has a soul.
• two such blessings—the natural world, and the world of writing: literature.
• the world’s otherness is antidote to confusion, that standing within this otherness—the beauty and the mystery of the world, out in the fields or deep inside books—can re-dignify the worst-stung heart.
• I read by day and into the night.
• I locked my door, from the inside, and leaped from the roof and went to the woods, by day or darkness.
• I read the way a person might swim, to save his or her life. I wrote that way too.
• They have one responsibility—to stay alive, if they can, and be foxes.
• I thought of it (language) as the door—a thousand opening doors!—past myself
• the difference between doing nothing, or doing a little, and the redemptive act of true effort
• You must not ever stop being whimsical.
• And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
• See a flock of them (clouds) come, on the sled of the wind, all kneeling above the blue sea.
• Each form sets a tone, enables a destiny, strikes a note in the universe unlike any other. How can we ever stop looking? How can we ever turn away?
• So, it comes first: the world. Then, literature. And then, what one pencil moving over a thousand miles of paper can (perhaps, sometimes) do.
• Live it. Give it back, someday, without bitterness, to the wild and weedy dunes.

of power and time

• And the thought which I had in hand, or almost in hand, is gone
• It (creativity) needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once.
• to scribble and erase and scribble again
• the interruption comes not from another but from the self itself, or some other self within the self
• Then you return to your work, only to find that the imps of idea have fled back into the mist.
• I am, myself, three selves at least.
• its presence rises, in memory, or from the steamy river of dreams
• It is with me in the present hour. It will be with me in the grave.
• This is the smiler and the doorkeeper.
• The clock! That twelve-figured moon skull, that white spider belly!
• Their ordinariness is the surety of the world. Their ordinariness makes the world go round.
• Such work does not refute the ordinary. It is, simply, something else.
• This self is out of love with the ordinary; it is out of love with time. It has a hunger for eternity.