"Let Mystery Have It's Place In You" Henri Frederic Amiel

"Let mystery have its place in you; do not be always turning up your whole soil with the ploughshare of self-examination, but leave a little fallow corner in your heart ready for any seed the winds may bring."

~ Henri Frederic Amiel

"The Mother of All Arts" Gene Logsdon

“As a working definition of art, I lean toward Tolstoy's: "Art is a human activity having for it's purpose the transmission to other of the highest and best feelings to which mankind has risen." It seems to me that, regarding agrarian art, the farther it moves away from the natural world, especially when the main goal is money profits, the more difficult it becomes for it to reflect "the highest and best feelings" of humanity. The same is true of, of course, of agriculture itself. The farther it tries to remove itself from nature in search of money, the more it moves away from the highest and healthiest kinds of food.”

~ Gene Logsdon, The Mother of All Arts: Agrarianism and the Creative Impulse

"You Are The Only Faithful Student You Have" Rumi

You are the only faithful student you have.
All the others leave eventually.
Have you been making yourself shallow
with making others eminent?
Just remember, when you're in union,
you don't have to fear
that you'll be drained.
The command comes to speak,
and you feel the ocean
moving through you.
Then comes, Be silent,
as when the rain stops,
and the trees in the orchard
begin to draw moisture
up into themselves.

~ Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, "You Are the Only Student You Have"

"Birth, Breath and Death" Amy Wright Glenn

"Wisdom and insight are born when we stay close to the birthing and dying. Wounds from the past can be healed. Forgiveness and perspective dawn. Our culture is currently fragmented from much of this wisdom. The training of doulas represents a healing shift. By holding compassionate and nonjudgmental space, doulas support families as they make room for the generations to enter and exit this world. As we attend to birth and death, we touch upon a great mystery and deeply benefit from being starkly reminded of our own mortality...While the birth/postpartum doula movement makes important inroads in our maternity care system, great commitment and insight are needed to bring doula care to the dying. The elderly are easily disregarded in a culture that worships youthfulness, independence and productivity. Like infants, the dying remind us of our fragility, our dependency and our need for each other. When we sequester either birth or death, we lose touch with the truth of our interdependence, the nesting of generations, and what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls our “interbeing.”

~ Amy Wright Glenn

"You are capable of love, and so need not despair of insignificance." Yorke Brown

"...you are most certainly an infinitesimal in the cold vastness of the cosmos, and yes, you are only one of billions of humans and other creatures who have come before and will come after, and your life is barely a mathematical instant in the span of time. But you are also--just as certainly--a miracle: you are a creature capable of thought, of wonder, of awe. You are a creature capable of recognizing that you are not the center of the Universe. And it is because of that very capacity that you can see in other people the same intrinsic value that you see in yourself. You are a miracle. You are capable of love, and so need not despair of insignificance."

~ Yorke Brown, Dartmouth Professor of Physics and Astronomy

"Late March" Richard Schiffman

Again the trees remembered
to make leaves.
In the forest of their recollection
many birds returned
singing.
They sang, they sang
because they forgave themselves
the winter, and all that remained
still bitter.
Yet it was early spring,
when the days were touch and go,
and a late snow could nip a shoot,
or freeze a fledgling in its nest.
And where would we be then?
But that’s not the point.
Do you think the magpie doesn’t know
that its chicks are at risk,
or the peach trees, their too-frail blossoms,
the new-awakened bees, all that is
incipient within us?
We know, but we can’t help ourselves
any more than they can,
any more than the earth can
stop hurtling through the night
of its own absence.
Must be something in the sap,
the blood, a force like gravity,
a trick called memory.
You name it. Or leave it nameless
that’s better—
how something returns
and keeps on returning
through a gap,
through a dimensional gate,
through a tear in the veil.
And there it is again.
Another spring.
To woo loss into song.

~ Richard Schiffman "Late March"

A Standing Ground by Wendell Berry

However just and anxious I have been
I will stop and step back
from the crowd of those who may agree
with what I say, and be apart.
There is no earthly promise of life or peace
but where the roots branch and weave
their patient silent passages in the dark;
uprooted, I have been furious without an aim.
I am not bound for any public place,
but for ground of my own
where I have planted vines and orchard trees,
and in the heat of the day climbed up
into the healing shadow of the woods.
Better than any argument is to rise at dawn
and pick dew-wet berries in a cup.

~ Wendell Berry, "A Standing Ground"