Just for now, without asking how, let yourself sink into stillness.
Just for now, lay down the weight you so patiently bear upon your shoulders.
Feel the earth receive you, and the infinite expanse of the sky grow even wider as your awareness reaches up to meet it.
Just for now, allow a wave of breath to enliven your experience.
Breathe out whatever blocks you from your truth.
Just for now, be boundless, free, with awakened energy tingling in your hands and feet.
Drink in the possibility of being who and what you really are - so fully alive that the world looks different, newly born and vibrant, just for now.

— Dana Faulds

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave the
pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin growing
over whatever winter did to us, a return to the strange
idea of continuous living despite the mess of us, the hurt,
the empty. Fine then, I’ll take it, the tree seems to say,
a new slick leaf unfurling like a fist to an open palm,
I’ll take it all.

— Ada Limón

When they turn the sun
on again I'll plant children
under it, I'll light up my soul
with a match and let it sing. I'll
take my bones and polish them, I'll
vacuum up my stale hair, I'll
pay all my neighbors' bad debts, I'll
write a poem called Yellow and put
my lips down to drink it up, I'll
feed myself spoonfuls of heat and
everyone will be home playing with
their wings and the planet will
shudder with all those smiles and
there will be no poison anywhere, no plague
in the sky and there will be a mother-broth
for all of the people and we will
never die, not one of us, we'll go on
won't we?

— Anne Sexton

you said,
tell me where you’ve been, love

and i thought of all the lost roads,
and dark corners,
and heavy work, and heartbreak,
and all of the healing

and i just said…
on my way here

— butterflies rising

YOUR LIFE IS YOUR LIFE
DON’T LET IT BE CLUBBED INTO DANK SUBMISSION.
BE ON THE WATCH.
THERE ARE WAYS OUT.
THERE IS A LIGHT SOMEWHERE.
IT MAY NOT BE MUCH LIGHT BUT
IT BEATS THE DARKNESS.
BE ON THE WATCH.
THE GODS WILL OFFER YOU CHANCES.
KNOW THEM.
TAKE THEM.
YOU CAN’T BEAT DEATH BUT
YOU CAN BEAT DEATH IN LIFE, SOMETIMES.
AND THE MORE OFTEN YOU LEARN TO DO IT,
THE MORE LIGHT THERE WILL BE.
YOUR LIFE IS YOUR LIFE.
KNOW IT WHILE YOU HAVE IT.
YOU ARE MARVELOUS
THE GODS WAIT TO DELIGHT
IN YOU.

— Charles Bukowski

Back when the earth was new

and heaven just a whisper,

back when the names of things

hadn't had time to stick;

back when the smallest breezes

melted summer into autumn,

when all the poplars quivered

sweetly in rank and file . . .

the world called, and I answered.

Each glance ignited to a gaze.

I caught my breath and called that life, swooned between spoonfuls of lemon sorbet.

I was pirouette and flourish,

I was filigree and flame.

How could I count my blessings

when I didn't know their names?

Back when everything was still to come, luck leaked out everywhere.

I gave my promise to the world,

and the world followed me here.

— Rita Dove

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,
Or the wind sweeps through a tree,
Or a dog howls in a far off farm,
I hold still and listen for a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place
Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,
The bird and the blowing wind
Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns to a tree,
And an animal, and a cloud bank.
Then changed and odd it comes home
And asks me questions. What should I reply?

— Hermann Hesse

Just when you seem to yourself
nothing but a flimsy web
if questions, you are given
the questions of others to hold
in the emptiness of your hands.
songbird eggs that can still hatch
if you keep them warm,
butterflies opening and closing themselves
in your cupped palms, trusting you not to injure
their scintillant fur, their dust.
You are given the questions of others
as if they were answers
to all you ask. Yes, perhaps
this gift is your answer.

— Denise Levertov

It took 3.8 billion years
of triumphant evolution,
remarkable collision,
and unbelievable confluence
made my sheer influence
of this infinite universe
and all of the starts
to get you here.

I hope that you never doubt again
that even when you are in pain,
that you are a miracle,
that every part of you is incredible.

— anonymous

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.

Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”

doesn’t make any sense.

The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.

Don’t go back to sleep.

You must ask for what you really want.

Don’t go back to sleep.

People are going back and forth across the doorsill

where the two worlds touch.

The door is round and open.

Don’t go back to sleep.

— Rumi

Then a woman said, “speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.”

And he answered:

Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.

And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.

And how else can it be?

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?

And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?

When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given

you sorrow that is giving you joy.

When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping

for that which has been your delight.

Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”

But I say unto you, they are inseparable.

Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is

asleep upon your bed.

Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.

Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.

When the treasure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your

sorrow rise or fall.

— Khalil Gibran

May I be a guard for those who need protection

A guide for those on the path

A boat, a raft, a bridge for those who wish to cross the flood

May I be a lamp in the darkness

A resting place for the weary

A healing medicine for all who are sick

A vase of plenty, a tree of miracles

And for the boundless multitudes of living beings

May I bring sustenance and awakening

Enduring like the earth and sky

Until all beings are freed from sorrow

And all are awakened.

— Shantideva

Like a door

the body opened and

the soul looked out.

Timidly at first, then

less timidly

until it was safe.

Then in hunger it ventured.

Then in brazen hunger,

then at the invitation

of any desire.

Promiscuous one, how will you find

god now? How will you

ascertain the divine?

Even the garden you were told to live in the body, not

outside it, and suffer in it

if that comes to be necessary.

How will god find you

if you are never in one place

long enough, never

in the home he gave you?

Or do you believe

you have no home, since god

never meant to contain you?

— Louise Glück

Listen to me, your body is not a temple.

Temples can be destroyed and desecrated.

Your body is a forest—thick canopies of maple trees and sweet scented wildflowers sprouting in the underwood.

You will grow back, over and over, no matter how badly you are devastated.

— Beau Taplin

I am not a graceful person. I am not a Sunday morning or a Friday sunset.

I am a Tuesday 2 a.m., gunshots muffled by a few city blocks, I am a broken window during February.

My bones crack on a nightly basis. I fall from elegance with a dull thud, and I apologize for my awkward sadness.

I sometimes believe that I don’t belong around people, that I belong to all the leap days that didn’t happen.

The way light and darkness mix under my skin has become a storm. You don’t see the lightning, but you hear the echoes

— Anna Peters

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

— William Butler Yeats

since feeling is first

who pays any attention

to the syntax of things

will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool

while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,

and kisses are a better fate

than wisdom

lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry

– the best gesture of my brain is less than

your eyelids flutter which says

we are for each other; then

laugh, leaning back in my arms

for life’s not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis

— e.e. cummings

Your new life is going to cost you your old one.

It’s going to cost you your comfort zone and your sense

of direction.

It’s going to cost you relationships and friends.

It’s going to cost you being liked and understood.

It doesn’t matter.

The people who are meant for you are going to meet you

on the other side. You’re going to build a new comfort

zone around the things that actually move you forward.

Instead of being liked, you’re going to be loved.

Instead of being understood, you’re going to be seen.

All you’re going to lose is what was built for a person you

no longer are.

— Brianna Wiest

My heart fills with with loving kindness. I love myself. May I be happy. May I be well. May I be peaceful. May I be free.

May all beings in my vicinity be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings in my city be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings in my state be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings in my country be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings on my continent be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings in my hemisphere be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings on planet Earth be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May my parents be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all my friends be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all my enemies be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

May all beings in the Universe be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

If I have hurt anyone, knowingly or unknowingly in thought, word or deed, I ask for their forgiveness.

If anyone has hurt me, knowingly or unknowingly in thought, word or deed, I extend my forgiveness.

May all beings everywhere, whether near or far, whether known to me or unknown, be happy. May they be well. May they be peaceful. May they be free.

— Buddhist Prayer

You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.

— Mary Oliver

This alone is what I wish for you: knowledge.
To understand each desire and its edge,
to know we are responsible for the lives
we change. No faith comes without cost,
no one believes without dying.
Now for the first time
I see clearly the trail you planted,
what ground opened to waste,
though you dreamed a wealth of flowers.

There are no curses, only mirrors
held up to the souls of gods and mortals.
And so I give up this fate, too.
Believe in yourself,
go ahead - see where it gets you.

— Rita Dove

The cosmos is filled with precious gems.

I want to offer a handful of them to you this morning.

Each moment you are alive is a gem,

shining through and containing earth and sky,

water and clouds.

It needs you to breathe gently

for the miracles to be displayed.

Suddenly you hear the birds singing,

the pines chanting,

see the flowers blooming,

the blue sky,

the white clouds,

the smile and the marvelous look

of your beloved.

You, the richest person on Earth,

who have been going around begging for a living,

stop being the destitute child.

Come back and claim your heritage.

We should enjoy our happiness

and offer it to everyone.

Cherish this very moment.

Let go of the stream of distress

and embrace life fully in your arms.


— Thich Nhat Hanh

How many years of beauty do I have left?

she asks me.

How many more do you want?

Here. Here is 34. Here is 50.

When you are 80 years old

and your beauty rises in ways

your cells cannot even imagine now

and your wild bones grow luminous and

ripe, having carried the weight

of a passionate life.

When your hair is aflame

with winter

and you have decades of

learning and leaving and loving

sewn into

the corners of your eyes

and your children come home

to find their own history

in your face.

When you know what it feels like to fail ferociously

and have gained the capacity

to rise and rise and rise again.

When you can make your tea

on a quiet and ridiculously lonely afternoon

and still have a song in your heart

Queen owl wings beating

beneath the cotton of your sweater.

Because your beauty began there

beneath the sweater and the skin,

remember?

This is when I will take you

into my arms and coo

YOU BRAVE AND GLORIOUS THING

you’ve come so far.

I see you.

Your beauty is breathtaking.


— Jeannette Encinias

The time will come

when, with elation

you will greet yourself arriving

at your own door, in your own mirror

and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.

You will love again the stranger who was your self.

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored

for another, who knows you by heart.

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,

peel your own image from the mirror.

Sit. Feast on your life.


— Derek Walcott

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


— Sylvia Plath

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves: who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, and fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.

Your playing small does not serve the world.

There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people will not feel insecure around you.

We are all meant to shine, as children do.

We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.

It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone and as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give others permission to do the same.

As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.

— Marianne Williamson

I am—yet what I am none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost:
I am the self-consumer of my woes— They rise and vanish in oblivious host,
Like shadows in love’s frenzied stifled throes
And yet I am, and live—like vapours tossed
Into the nothingness of scorn and noise,
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my life’s esteems;
Even the dearest that I loved the best
Are strange—nay, rather, stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God,
And sleep as I in childhood sweetly slept,
Untroubling and untroubled where I lie
The grass below—above the vaulted sky.

— John Clare (1848)

Why with those red flames

are rubies ready to burn?

Why does the heart of the topaz

have yellow honeycombs?

Why does the rose amuse itself

by changing the color of its dreams?

Why does the emerald grow cold

like a drowned submarine?

And why does the sky turn pale

over the June stars?

Where does the lizard’s tail

buy its fresh paint?

Where is the underground fire

that resurrects the carnations?

Where does the salt get

that transparent gaze?

Where did the coals sleep

that they got up so dark?

And where, where does the tiger buy

stripes of mourning, stripes of gold?

When did the honeysuckle begin

to know its perfume?

When did the pinetree realize

its fragrant effect?

When did the lemons learn

the same catechism as the sun?

When did smoke learn to fly?

When do the roots converse?

What is water like in the stars?

Why is the scorpion poisonous,

why is the elephant benign?

What does the tortoise meditate on?

Where does the shade withdraw?

What song does the rain repeat?

Where do the birds go to die?

And why are the leaves green?

What we know is so little

and what we presume is so much

and we learn so slowly

that we ask and then we die.

Better to keep our pride

for the city of the dead

on the day of the departed

and there when the wind goes through

the hollows of your skull

it will decipher these enigmas for you,

whispering the truth in the space

where your ears used to be.

— Pablo Neruda

Praise to the emptiness that blanks out existence. Existence:

This place made from our love for that emptiness!

Yet somehow comes emptiness,

this existence goes.

Praise to that happening, over and over!

For years I pulled my own existence out of emptiness.

Then one swoop, one swing of the arm,

that work is over.

Free of who I was, free of presence, free of dangerous fear, hope,

free of mountainous wanting.

The here-and-now mountain is a tiny piece of a piece of straw

blown off into emptiness.

These words I’m saying so much begin to lose meaning:

Existence, emptiness, mountain, straw:

Words and what they try to say swept

out the window, down the slant of the roof.