The Secret Of It All

"The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment...to put things down without deliberation...without worrying about their style...without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote, wrote, wrote… By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught."

Walt Whitman

Mantra

When a ray of sunshine comes, open out, absorb it to the depths of your being. Never think that an hour earlier you were cold and that an hour later you will be cold again. Just enjoy. Latch on to the passing minute. Shut off the workings of memory and hope… Take away from suffering its double drumbeat of resonance, memory and fear. Suffering may persist, but already it is relieved by half. Throw yourself into each moment as if it were the only one that really existed.

From And There Was Light by Jacques Lusseyran via

With Reverence

“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.

When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. 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: The Invisible Embrace

Ever Always Reading about Writing

“I think of writing like I think of building a house. First you walk through the front door with that first line, first image, first phrase, and ask, “What am I going to do next? Am I going to build a room to my left? And am I going to go into that room? Will I allow it to have a door that leads to another room?” I think of writing as building doors to rooms, and then saying, “Let’s just walk through it. And let’s put in windows to see what the light shows.”

I think of writing as a form of allowance and permission. It’s telling yourself to keep making those doors and walking through them. That, to me, is the blueprint for surprise. When you look up and it’s been an hour or two hours of writing, you’re so far from your first door, you’re in a room you never thought existed. And it didn’t. It didn’t exist in the world. You made it. It’s a beautiful thing. It’s why writing and making art is so special, because you can’t predict what it will look like, sound like, read like, until it’s been made.”

Devin Kelly

By Heart

AFTER YEARS

Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer's retina
as he stood in the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.

---Ted Kooser

In my twenties, I would sometimes walk down and back Summit Avenue with a poem in my hand - saying each line over and over again until I could recall it fixedly.
This, I learned, is how to know a poem.