overestimated

'I think God, in creating man, somewhat overestimated his ability."

— Oscar Wilde

freedom

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

― David Foster Wallace, This Is Water

let no wind come

Let No Wind Come
by May Sarton 

You had found words for this and called it love:
But when your cheek lay against mine like one
Leaf on another leaf, it was not love;
And when I bent to you, it was not done
For love. From deeper in the rooted mind
There came as softly as a flowering tree
A light as petals falling on the blind—
I saw life grow and fold itself in me.
And now I have a body who had none,
And now I have a heart who had before
Only a moth’s wing lying at the bone,
Only a moth’s heart beating at the core.
It is not less than love that at your kiss
I saw a flower unfold—it is not less.

valuable in themselves

But I would like to go a little further still, and honor the possibility that the stories that poems come out of are valuable in themselves, so far as they are known. Those who are living and writing at a given time are not isolated poetry dispensers more or less equivalent to soft-drink machines, awaiting the small change of critical approval. We are, figuratively at least, members of a community, joined together by our stories. We are inevitably collaborators. We are never in any simple sense the authors of our own work. The body of work we make for ourselves in our time is only remotely a matter of literary history. The work we make is the work we are living by, and not in the hope of making literary history, but in the hope of using, correcting so far as we are able, and passing on the art of human life, of human flourishing, which includes the arts of reading and writing poetry.

— Wendell Berry. "Sweetness Preserved," Imagination in Place

flowers in the dooryards

We drove through valleys where human life had grown careless and halfhearted under the influence of the coal industry and its invariable ruination. We drove through other valleys spared so far the misfortune of coal, where the modest houses were painted and there were flowers in the dooryards and excellent vegetable gardens. 

— Wendell Berry, from "My Conversation with Gurney Norman", Imagination in Place

19 abandon holiness

Abandon holiness, discard cleverness
and the people will benefit greatly. 

 
Eliminate philanthropy, put away morality
and the people will regain compassion. 

Forsake academic knowledge, relinquish propriety
and the people will lose their anxieties. 

Disavow cunning, renounce greed
and there will be no theft. 

These lessons are superficial, and could go on forever.
Even then they would still not be sufficient.
One need only rely upon this:

Manifest simplicity, like an undyed silk.
Hold to your natural state, like uncarved wood.
Cast off your ego, and curtail your desires.

— Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

take the present

Ode I.11
Horace (65-8 B.C.E.)

Leucon, no one’s allowed to know his fate,
Not you, not me: don’t ask, don’t hunt for answers
In tea leaves or palms. Be patient with whatever comes.
This could be our last winter, it could be many
More, pounding the Tuscan Sea on these rocks:
Do what you must, be wise, cut your vines
And forget about hope. Time goes running, even
As we talk. Take the present, the future’s no one’s affair.


[translated by Burton Raffel]