We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,
Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,
The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.
From Wallace Stevens’s “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” (1950)
O night,
you take the petals
of the roses in your hand,
but leave the stark core
of the rose
to perish on the branch.
—H. D., from “Evening”
Source: awritersruminations
Adagio of islands, O my Prodigal
τὰ ὄντα ἰέναι τε πάντα καὶ μένειν οὐδέν”
Ta onta ienai te panta kai menein ouden
“All entities move and nothing remains still”
—Heraclitus in Plato’s Cratylus (401d)
Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of home and friends. You are constantly off balance. Nothing is yours except the essential things—air, sleep, dreams, the sea, the sky—all things tending towards the eternal or what we imagine of it.
(via proustitute)
Source: lonely-living
Time, as it flows, wears down and destroys that which is temporal.
Stars and blossoming fruit trees: utter permanence and extreme fragility give an equal sense of eternity.
The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful because vulnerability is a mark of existence.
Source: hyperboria
Rainer Maria Rilke, “Sunset”
Slowly the west reaches for clothes of new colours
which it passes to a row of ancient trees.
You look, and soon these two worlds both leave you,
one part climbs toward heaven, one sinks to earth,
leaving you, not really belonging to either,
not so helplessly dark as that house that is silent,
not so unswervingly given to the eternal as that thing
that turns to a star each night and climbs —-
leaving you (it is impossible to untangle the threads)
your own life, timid and standing high and growing,
so that, sometimes blocked in, sometimes reaching out,
one moment your life is a stone in you, and the next, a star.
Translated by Robert Bly
Source: sharingpoetry
