What are you supposed to do with all the love

What are you supposed to do with all the love you have for somebody if that person is no longer there? What happens to all that leftover love? Do you suppress it? Do you ignore it? Are you supposed to give it to someone else?

After writing poems all day, I go off to see the moon in the pines.

After writing poems all day, I go off to see the moon in the pines.

He who watches the sea doesn't know the sea.

He who watches the sea doesn't know the sea. He who sits by the shore doesn't know the sea. And he who comes only to look doesn't know the sea. Only he who dives knows the sea. He takes risks. He forgets the sea in the sea. He dissolves in the unknown, as he might in a lover. Nothing to separate the blueness from the water. And there you seize upon a world that words can't get hold of. It can't be seen or touched except in the depths of the sea. The sea is the sea.

Listen privately

Listen privately, silently to the voices that rise up from the pages of books and from your own heart. Be still and listen to the voices that belong to the streambanks and the trees and the open fields. There are songs and sayings that belong to this place, by which it speaks for itself and no other.

Found your hope, then, on the ground under your feet.

No one can tell what goes on in between the person

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side or you don’t.

He has the intensity,

He has the intensity, which makes him live everything he feels. 

There will be days when you want to just throw in the towel and give up

There will be days when you want to just throw in the towel and give up. There will be days when nothing makes sense anymore and you feel like happiness won’t show its face to you any time soon. There will be days of stiff necks and no sleep and sore muscles. People will be cruel. Food will go bad. You will feel like the world is out to get you.

But then spring arrives. Something big blooms in your chest. Sparrows sing to you and the air suddenly is clearer. You fall in love. You will grow a garden. Good things will start to come to you, beautiful people will find you. Remember those good things when the days get cold and the nights get long. Remember that you deserve to feel good. That you deserve to have good people and good food and a safe place to come home to. Remember that bad moods pass that all bad days end. And that no matter where you are or how lonely you get, somebody out there is looking for you and is waiting to for you to find them and give them your love.

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us

Perhaps the most important thing we bring to another person is the silence in us. Not the sort of silence that is filled with unspoken criticism or hard withdrawal. The sort of silence that is a place of refuge, of rest, of acceptance of someone as they are.

Ah listen, for silence is not lonely.

Ah listen, for silence is not lonely. Imitate the magnificent trees, that speak no word of their rapture, but only breathe largely the luminous breeze.

I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else.

I just wanted to get lost, become one with somewhere else.