Poems

NPM Day 28: Write a Cento

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today is National Great Poetry Reading Day! No, I’m serious! It’s a thing.
Go get you some Angelou, Dickinson or Whitman,
some Baraka, some Stein, some Oliver, and read it out loud.
Read to yourself, to your lover, to your students,
to your sister, to your cat. Read to the wind,
to the apple tree, to the dishwasher, to the dust bunnies.

Dive into those great poems and make yourself a cento, which means “patchwork garment” in Latin, which makes this poem form seem extra special. Really, it’s a glorified found poem. You pull lines from a bunch of different poems and you make a poem from them, sticking them together in ways that seem to connect and complete each other’s thoughts and ideas. Homer did it. So did Virgil. So you can, too. Put an asterisk at the bottom of your page and list the poets you borrowed from.

Gratitude List:
1. May apples
2. Maples
3. Moooon
4. Massage
5. Meditation

May we walk in Beauty!

“The great affair, the love affair with life, is to live as variously as possible, to groom one’s curiosity like a high-spirited thoroughbred, climb aboard, and gallop over the thick, sun-struck hills every day. Where there is no risk, the emotional terrain is flat and unyielding, and, despite all its dimensions, valleys, pinnacles, and detours, life will seem to have none of its magnificent geography, only a length. It began in mystery, and it will end in mystery, but what a savage and beautiful country lies in between.” —Diane Ackerman

“I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.” ―Wendell Berry

“A crone is a woman who has found her voice. She knows that silence is consent. This is a quality that makes older women feared. It is not the innocent voice of a child who says, “the emperor has no clothes,” but the fierce truthfulness of the crone that is the voice of reality. Both the innocent child and the crone are seeing through the illusions, denials, or “spin” to the truth. But the crone knows about the deception and its consequences, and it angers her. Her fierceness springs from the heart, gives her courage, makes her a force to be reckoned with.” —Jean Shinoda Bolen

“Go as far as you can see; when you get there you’ll be able to see farther.” —Thomas Carlyle

“At the end of the day, I’d rather be excluded for who I include than included for who I exclude.” —Eston Williams

“Free me. . .from words, that I may discover the signified, the word unspoken in the darkness.” —Byzantine Prayer

“Father, Mother, God,
Thank you for your presence
during the hard and mean days.
For then we have you to lean upon.
For those who have no voice,
we ask you to speak.
For those who feel unworthy,
we ask you to pour your love out
in waterfalls of tenderness.
For those who live in pain,
we ask you to bathe them
in the river of your healing.
Dear Creator, You, the borderless
sea of substance, we ask you to give to all the
world that which we need most—Peace.”
—Maya Angelou

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”
—Leonard Bernstein

Stillness. One of the doors
into the temple.”
—Mary Oliver

“If you just learn a single trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… Until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.” —Harper Lee

NPM Day 27: Restful

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Write a poem that relaxes, a poem that settles, that brings rest. Maybe it’s a lullaby. Maybe it’s a poem for meditation or yoga practice.
And another thing to do today: Memorize a poem you’ve written–get a poem out into the air. Poetry began as an oral art, and it longs to be set free into the air again.

Gratitude List:
1. Gulf Shrimp with risotto for supper. That was delicious.
2. Full Moon
3. Fluttering blossoms
4. Patterns
5. Lights at ends of tunnels.

May we walk in Beauty!

“As truly as God is our father, so truly is God our mother.” —Julian of Norwich

“Had I not created my whole world, I would certainly have died in other people’s.” ―Anaïs Nin

“Come forth into the light of things, Let Nature be your teacher.” ―William Wordsworth

Forever Oneness,
who sings to us in silence,
who teaches us through each other.
Guide my steps with strength and wisdom.
May I see the lessons as I walk,
honor the Purpose of all things.
Help me touch with respect,
always speak from behind my eyes.
Let me observe, not judge.
May I cause no harm,
and leave music and beauty after my visit.
When I return to forever
may the circle be closed
and the spiral be broader.
―Bee Lake (Aboriginal poet)

“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it is all about.”
―Joseph Campbell

“I can’t tell you why your story is important, only that it is.” ―Mara Eve Robbins

NPM Day 26: Referential Poetry

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National Poetry Month Prompt Day 26:

My friend Keith suggested this one:
A poem with an epigraph begins with a quotation from another literary work.
An “after” poem responds to another poem or work of literature (you include the phrase “after so-and-so after your title)
A bounce, usually at a poetry reading, reminds listeners of a poem they just heard–either because it is similar or in contrast to the previous poet’s work.

People like to do after poems related to William Carlos Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow” and “This Is Just to Say.” Try writing a poem that refers to another poem, either in style or structure, or in an epigraph. Be sure to quote your original source.

Gratitude List:
1. I slept most of the night last night. I have been struggling for about a week now with intense pain in my shoulder, both in the trapezius muscle and something that feels like nerve pain in the upper arm, and when I wake up at night, I haven’t been able to get back to sleep because of the pain. Last night, I finally figured out the combination of elements (yoga and acetaminophen, mostly) to allow me to get back to sleep when I woke up.
2. Titmouses (titmice?) calling in the dawn
3. Redbud trees in bloom.
4. Ferns unfurling
5. Watching the grass grow through the straw in the places where the diggers dug up the lawn last fall for the new septic system. New growth.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.” —Simone Weil

“You can never leave footprints that last if you are always walking on tiptoe.” —Leymah Gbowee

“God speaks to each of us as [she] makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.” —Rainer Maria Rilke

“I do not see a delegation of the four-footed.
I see no seat for the eagles.” —Chief Oren Lyons, Onondaga

“Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.” —Kurt Vonnegut

“I told them we’re tired of the culture wars, tired of Christianity getting entangled with party politics and power. Millennials want to be known by what we’re for, I said, not just what we’re against. We don’t want to choose between science and religion or between our intellectual integrity and our faith. Instead, we long for our churches to be safe places to doubt, to ask questions, and to tell the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable. We want to talk about the tough stuff—biblical interpretation, religious pluralism, sexuality, racial reconciliation, and social justice—but without predetermined conclusions or simplistic answers. We want to bring our whole selves through the church doors, without leaving our hearts and minds behind, without wearing a mask.” ―Rachel Held Evans

Go deeper.
Past thoughts into silence.
Past silence into stillness.
Past stillness into the heart.
Let love consume all that is left of you.
—Kabir

NPM Day 25: Ancestors

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / 1 Comment

Imagine one of your ancestors, someone in the massive branching web of individuals who participated in the making of you. Write yourself a letter poem from your ancestor. Or write your ancestor a letter. Or write one to some future descendant. Roots and wings, baby.

Gratitude List:
1. The people who help from the sidelines and behind the scenes, not for accolades, because it’s who they are.
2. Book Sale and Yard Sale.
3. Smoothies
4. Yesterday, we got to see my mother-in-law in her new room. It’s the first time in over a year that we have spoken face-to-face instead of through a screen or a window. And we’re seeing my parents pretty regularly again, too
5. Green. Rain. Robin’s rain song. Wind chimes.

May we walk in Beauty!

“An artist’s duty, as far as I’m concerned, is to reflect the times. I think that is true of painters, sculptors, poets, musicians. As far as I’m concerned, it’s their choice, but I CHOOSE to reflect the times and situations in which I find myself. That, to me, is my duty. And at this crucial time in our lives, when everything is so desperate, when every day is a matter of survival, I don’t think you can help but be involved. Young people, black and white, know this. That’s why they’re so involved in politics. We will shape and mold this country or it will not be molded and shaped at all anymore. So I don’t think you have a choice. How can you be an artist and NOT reflect the times? That to me is the definition of an artist.” —Nina Simone

“A loving silence often has far more power
to heal and to connect than the
most well-intentioned words.” —Rachel Naomi Remen

“The secret to waking up is unscrambling the word earth.” —anonymous

“I have come to regard with some suspicion those who claim that the Bible never troubles them. I can only assume this means they haven’t actually read it.” ―Rachel Held Evans

“What a comfort to know that God is a poet.” ―Rachel Held Evans

“Geometry is the archetype of the beauty of the world.” —Johannes Kepler

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for.” —John Keating (Robin Williams in Dead Poet Society)

“You are the Ground of all being
the Well-Spring of time
Womb of the earth
the Seed-Force of stars.
And so at the opening of this day
we wait
not for blessings from afar
but for You
the very Soil of our soul
the early Freshness of morning
the first Breath of day.”
—John Philip Newell

NPM Day 24: Lock and Key

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Poetry Prompt for the Day:

Write a Lock and Key poem (I’m making this up as I go along).
Let the first stanza be a conundrum or a riddle, something locked or troubling or hidden behind a locked door.
Let the second stanza be the key. Offer something in the second stanza that opens the locked door to solve the conundrum or the riddle, or the puzzle of your inner world.

(Extra points if you can figure out how to write it in the shape of a keyhole and a key.)

Gratitude List:
1. Sweet compliment #1: Yesterday, a student brought me some rice pudding she had just made in foods class. It was still warm, and so delicious! She told me, “You just look like someone who would like warm pudding.” She was a little sheepish afterward, because it could sound back-handed, but I love it. I will be the woman who loves warm pudding.
2. Sweet Compliment #2: Yesterday I wore a pair of pants a friend of mine gave me. I love the velvety smoothness of them, and they push me out of my personal comfort zone, fashion-wise, but they really look like me. When I was at the doctor’s office to check out my sore shoulder, the one nurse who came in and out of the room a couple times began referring to me as the “cool outfit lady.” Here’s to a nice comfortable pair of pants.
3. These goldfinches are like dropping of fluttering sunlight.
4. Yesterday’s Earth Day chapel. Once a year, we set up different stations around the old ball field during chapel, and students wander around, tasting vegetables and meadow tea, learning to identify wildflowers on wildflower walks, playing games, fishing in the creek, and other things that the teachers set up for them. This year, we have a long lunch period with chapel as part of it, so the whole time was a lot longer than in the past. I set up a meditation station, with my labyrinth sheet. I read poetry and played recorder and led students who wandered past in breathing meditations and labyrinth walks. It was such a gently joyful time. It ended with a group of middle schoolers who just wanted to keep hanging out in the quiet space. My heart is full.
5. How making small changes in daily rhythms leads to bigger changes in outlook and perspective.

May we walk in Beauty!

“People have said to me, ‘You’re so courageous. Aren’t you ever afraid?’ I laugh because it’s not possible to be courageous if you’re not afraid. Courage doesn’t happen without fear; it happens in spite of fear. The word courage derives from ‘coeur’, the French for ‘heart.’ True courage happens only when we face our fear and choose to act anyway, out of love.” —Julia Butterfly Hill

“Where is our comfort but in the free, uninvolved, finally mysterious beauty and grace of this world that we did not make, that has no price? Where is our sanity but there? Where is our pleasure but in working and resting kindly in the presence of this world?” —Wendell Berry

“Every country should have a Ministry of Peace” —Nobel Laureate Mairead Maguire

“Disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.” —Tom Robbins

“I never want to lose the story-loving child in me. A story that meant one thing to me when I was forty may mean something quite different to me today.” —Madeleine L’Engle

NPM Day 23: Fools and Madmen

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Lend Me Your Ears:
Today is the day that Shakespeare died. Also, although there is no definitive evidence, based on his baptismal records, it seems to have been his birthdate as well.

Write a Shakespeare Poem.
Find a simple quote from Shakespeare and weave it into a poem. Use it as an epigraph. Or begin each line of your poem with one of the words of the quote. Choose a Shakespeare play and search for words and phrases in order to make a Found Poem. Write in iambic pentameter. Write a poem from the point of view of Lear’s Fool. Write a Shakespearean sonnet (look it up). Write a poem titled “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and go from there. Write about dying on your birthday.

Gratitude:
Circles of community

“‪Good morning. There is a small, but meaningful thing you could do today in the service of your long term goal. Do that thing and then celebrate your progress with wild abandon. This is how we cultivate our dreams with a gardener’s gentle diligence.‬” —Jarod K. Anderson, The Cryptonaturalist

“Most lives are not distinguished by great achievements. They are measured by an infinite number of small ones. Each time you do a kindness for someone or bring a smile to his face, it gives your life meaning. Never doubt your value, little friend. The world would be a dismal place without you in it.” —Lisa Kleypas

“Decide to rise.
Lean in. Listen up. Closely.
It’s your soul speaking and she says,
Get UP! I need you. I want you. I am you. Choose me.
Lean in. Listen up. Closely.
Decide to rise.” —Danielle LaPorte

“What you are comes to you.” —Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Poetry, indeed, has always been one of humanity’s sharpest tools for puncturing the shrink-wrap of silence and oppression, and although it may appear to be galaxies apart from science, these two channels of truth have something essential in common: nature, the raw material for both. To impoverish the world of the birds and the bees is to impoverish it of the bards and the biologists.” —Jane Hirschfield

“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light.” —Helen Keller

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing
and rightdoing there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass
the world is too full to talk about.”
―Jalaluddin Rumi (Barks, trans.)

“We Are…
our grandmothers’ prayers,
we are our grandfathers’ dreamings,
we are the breath of the ancestors,
we are the spirit of God.”
―Ysaye M. Barnwell

NPM Day 22: Earth Day

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment
The fungal work of the stump is mostly dormant at the moment, but gill-on-the-grass and dandelions and faeries abide.

National Poetry Month Poetry Prompt:
Write a poem to celebrate Earth Day. Make it Prophecy, make it a Prayer, make it a Mantra for healing the planet, make it a Celebration.

Here’s mine. I’m sure it’s been done by others a hundred different ways already:
I pledge allegiance to Mother Earth,
and to the communities which she supports:
one planet, infused with Spirit,
interconnected,
with nourishment
and peace
for all.

Gratitude List on Earth Day:
1. Fresh, clear water
2. Microbe-rich soil
3. Crisp, clean air
4. Pollen, seed, and egg
5. All the living beings who inhabit Earth

May we walk humbly, in Beauty!

Earth Day Words:
“The world is, in truth, a holy place.” —Teilhard de Chardin

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.” —Henry David Thoreau

“You are your own cartographer now.” —Ralph Blum

“If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke

“Every creature is a word of God.” ―Meister Eckhart

“The forest for me is a temple, a cathedral of tree canopies and dancing light.” ―Dr. Jane Goodall

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it’s not.” ―The Onceler (Dr. Seuss)

“The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.” ―Rachel Carson

William Stafford: “I place my feet with care in such a world.”

“A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.” ―John Sawhill

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature — the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” ―Rachel Carson

“A child’s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full or wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children, I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantment of later year…the alienation from the sources of our strength.” ―Rachel Carson

“Few words are so revealing of Western sexual prejudice as the word Goddess, in contrast to the word God. Modern connotations differ vastly from those of the ancients, to whom the Goddess was a full-fledged cosmic parent figure who created the universe and its laws, ruler of Nature, Fate, Time, Eternity, Truth, Wisdom, Justice, Love, Birth, Death, Etc.” ―Barbara G. Walker

“Our vitality is inextricably bound up with creativity. Like a tree whose expression is fruit, giving our gifts is what keeps life pushing through our veins. It’s what keeps us feeling alive. As anyone who has strayed too far from their creativity knows, without it every corner of one’s life can fall prey to a terrible greying spread. As Kahlil Gibran writes about trees in an orchard, “They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.” —by Toko-pa Turner

NPM Day 21: Justice

/ Beth Weaver-Kreider / Leave a comment

Today, write a poem about accountability and consequences. Or make an acrostic poem about JUSTICE. Or try your hand at a credo poem, expressing what kind of society you want to be part of. Perhaps write a letter to the future, explaining what future you have been trying to manifest here and now. You could take a verse—like “Let justice roll down like waters”—and use it as your epigraph, or as a repeated phrase in a chant poem. Find a picture of the blind goddess Justice with her scales, or the tarot card Justice with scales and two-edged sword, and write a poem about justice personified.

Gratitude List:
1. Finally, justice. It’s a hard gratitude, not a soft one, like blossoms and birdsong, because a man is dead, and now yet another black child is dead, and we still have so much work to do, but one step toward a change has been made. Now we work.
2. Collage, quilting, mosaics, found poetry, creating a life: taking pieces and fragments and putting them together to create beauty.
3. Okay, blossoms and birdsong. They’re soft, but they’re also–some days–the crumbs on the pathway that help me find my way.
4. Reflections. Light on the windows. The suggestions of worlds within worlds. Worlds beyond worlds. They way you reflect me, and I reflect you.
5. Smoothies. For some reason, I never really want them in the winter, but spring and summer bring smoothie weather. I look forward to berry season.

May we walk in Beauty!

“Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession. . .but about securing a portal.” —Laura Miller

“I’m writing a first draft and reminding myself that I’m simply shoveling sand into a box so that later I can build castles.” ―Shannon Hale

“I can promise you that women working together―linked, informed, and educated―can bring peace and prosperity to this forsaken planet.” ―Isabel Allende

“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul alike.” ―John Muir

“When we went to jail, we were setting our faces against the world, against things as they are, the terrible injustice of our capitalist industrial system which lives by war and by preparing for war.” ―Dorothy Day

“What is not acceptable is silence in face of oppression. Boycott if you want, or participate if you want. But do not remain silent in face of injustice.” ―Omid Safi

“When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.” ―John O’Donohue

“Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness. What ails us is our sense of beauty is so bruised and blunted, we miss all the best.” ―D. H. Lawrence

“Poems are maps to the place where you already are.” —Jane Hirshfield

“Be still, and the world is bound to turn herself inside out to entertain you. Everywhere you look, joyful noise is clanging to drown out quiet desperation. The choice is to draw the blinds and shut it all out, or believe.” ―Barbara Kingsolver

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.” ―Hermann Hesse

NPM Day Twenty: Lost & Gained in Translation

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Lost and Gained in Translation:
Take a short poem you’ve written. Open Google Translate. Copy and paste your poem into the translator. Turn it into French, or Urdu, or Javanese, and back again. What happened to it? What startles you? Copy out the phrases and combinations you like. Try it again. The final poem could be anything.

I sent my Science poem from yesterday through quite a number of translation transformations. At one point, science became elm, then alarm, then bell, and finally, depression. The mouse became a moth and a beetle and a butterfly and a bill. It began to sound so much like someone was telling my fortune that I kept the five phrases pretty much intact as I went.

Depression: The Bell
(Telling Your Fortune)

Be quiet like a moth walking on a fence.
The model is simple, but the money is hard,
Because of the large number of central bodies.
Look closely at all the evidence.
Purify your heart with reverence.

The original, for Reference:

Science

Silent as a mouse creeping along a fence,
Simple the patterns, but intricate the sense,
Since what’s in the center is often intense,
Sift carefully through all the evidence,
Silt washes away, leaving behind reverence.

Gratitude List:
1. Trusting my instincts
2. Clear, fresh, sweet water
3. That titmouse calling out in the dawn, insisting on his place in the world
4. I’m mostly sleeping through the night again
5. Memory

May we walk in Beauty!

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” —Louise Erdrich

“To light a candle is to cast a shadow…”
―Ursula K. Le Guin

“Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love.” ―Claude Monet

“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced.” ―Malala Yousafzai

I called through your door,
“The mystics are gathering in the street. Come out!”
“Leave me alone. I’m sick.”
“I don’t care if you’re dead! Jesus is here,
and he wants to resurrect somebody!”
―Jalaludin Rumi (trans. by Barks)

“Your hand opens and closes, opens and closes. If it were always a fist or always stretched open, you would be paralysed. Your deepest presence is in every small contracting and expanding, the two as beautifully balanced and coordinated as birds’ wings.”
―Jalaluddin Rumi (trans. by Barks)

“Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terror, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.”
―Anaïs Nin

“Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries.”
―Haruki Murakami

“All great spirituality is about what we do with our pain. If we do not transform our pain, we will transmit it to those around us.” —Richard Rohr

NPM Day Eighteen: National Haiku Day

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April first had a sort-of-haiku poem in it, but today is actually National Haiku Day, so we have to write haiku today. The American form of the ancient Japanese tradition is a three-stanza syllable-count poem with lines of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. At its most basic, that’s it, but there are further rules to follow, if you want to take on that challenge:
Make the theme about nature
Focus on a very specific, clear image, and then add a second very crisp image
Use sensory words
One of the words in the poem gives a sense of the season of the year
The third line offers a surprise or twist or shift (often that second image)

Here’s my attempt for the morning:
Spring sun warms feathers.
Tiny sparrow hops, sees me.
The cat is also watching.

Gratitude List:
1. How sun shines on the green
2. How squirrels suddenly stop, and stand with their hands over their hearts, wide-eyed
3. How invigorating a morning shower feels
4. How everything is in bud, is in flower. Me, too. You, too.
5. How wise words enter the labyrinth of the heart.

May we walk in Beauty!

Sunday’s Messages:
“The beginning of love is the will to let those we love be perfectly themselves, the resolution not to twist them to fit our own image. If in loving them we do not love what they are, but only their potential likeness to ourselves, then we do not love them: we only love the reflection of ourselves we find in them.” ―Thomas Merton

“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.” ―Thomas Merton

“We see quite clearly that what happens
to the nonhuman happens to the human.
What happens to the outer world
happens to the inner world.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur
then the emotional, imaginative,
intellectual, and spiritual life of the human
is diminished or extinguished.
Without the soaring birds, the great forests,
the sounds and coloration of the insects,
the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields,
the sight of the clouds by day
and the stars at night, we become impoverished
in all that makes us human.”
―Thomas Berry

“All acts of kindness are lights in the war for justice.” ―Joy Harjo

“We have only begun to know
the power that is in us if we would join
our solitudes in the communion of struggle.” ―Denise Levertov

“There are two types of people. Avoid them.” —Mary Engelbreit