Wanderer, your footprints are
the path, and nothing else;
wanderer, there is no path,
the path is made by walking.
Walking makes the path,
and on glancing back
one sees the path
that must never be trod again.
Wanderer, there is no path—
Just your wake in the sea.
Antonio Machado, Selected Poems of Antonio Machado
translation, Betty Jean Craige
All I have in the world is my balls and my word,
and I don’t break them for no one.
Oliver Stone, Scarface
Journeys bring power and love
back into you. If you can't go somewhere,
move in the passageways of the self.
They are like shafts of light,
always changing, and you change
when you explore them.
These Branching Moments: Forty Odes by Rumi, Coleman Barks
At the gate, I sit in a row of blue seats
with the possible company of my death,
this sprawling miscellany of people -
carry-on bags and paperbacks -
that could be gathered in a flash
into a band of pilgrims on the last open road.
Not that I think
if our plane crumpled into a mountain
we would all ascend together,
holding hands like a ring of sky divers,
into a sudden gasp of brightness,
or that there would be some common spot
for us to reunite to jubilize the moment,
some spaceless, pillarless Greece
where we could, at the count of three,
toss our ashes into the sunny air.
It's just that the way that man has his briefcase
so carefully arranged,
the way that girl is cooling her tea,
and the flow of the comb that woman
passes through her daughter's hair...
and when you consider the altitude,
the secret parts of the engines,
and all the hard water and the deep canyons below...
well, I just think it would be good if one of us
maybe stood up and said a few words,
or, so as not to involve the police,
at least quietly wrote something down.
Billy Collins
There are no shortcuts to any place worth going.
Beverly Sills, Conquering an Enemy Called Average
My grandfather once told me that there two kinds of people:
those who do the work
and those who take the credit.
He told me to try to be in the first group;
there was much less competition there.
Indira Gandhi, Indira Gandhi, Saviour of Democracy
Dedicated to the memory of Karen Silkwood and Eliot Gralla
“From too much love of living,
Hope and desire set free,
Even the weariest river
Winds somewhere to the sea--“
But we have only begun
To love the earth.
We have only begun
To imagine the fullness of life.
How could we tire of hope?
-- so much is in bud.
How can desire fail?
-- we have only begun
to imagine justice and mercy,
only begun to envision
how it might be
to live as siblings with beast and flower,
not as oppressors.
Surely our river
cannot already be hastening
into the sea of nonbeing?
Surely it cannot
drag, in the silt,
all that is innocent?
Not yet, not yet—
there is too much broken
that must be mended,
too much hurt we have done to each other
that cannot yet be forgiven.
We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.
So much is unfolding that must
complete its gesture,
so much is in bud.
Denise Levertov
Humor is what happens
when we're told the truth quicker
and more directly than we're used to.
George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breath. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice.
She knows the origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all peopleare you.
Remember you are this universe and this universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
Joy Harjo
A thing is whole
according to how free it is of inner contradictions.
When it is at war with itself,
and gives rise to forces which act to tear it down,
it is unwhole.
The more free it is of its own inner contradictions,
the more whole and healthy and wholehearted it becomes.
Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building