Echoes

The space between heaven and earth is like a bellows: empty, yet inexhaustible. The more it is worked, the more it yields. Many words count for little — hold fast to the center.

This frail vessel thou emptiest again and again, and fillest it ever with fresh life. This little flute of a reed thou hast carried over hills and dales, and hast breathed through it melodies eternally new.

"We know how to speak many false things as though they were true; but we know, when we will, to utter true things." So said the ready-voiced daughters of great Zeus, and they breathed into me a divine voice to celebrate things that shall be and things there were aforetime.

In the midst of silence there was spoken within me a secret word. But to hear this word in stillness, all things must be hushed and at rest in this silence — there must be a stillness, and then we may hear it. The very best and noblest attainment in this life is to be silent and let God work and speak within.

Trees are the earth's endless effort to speak to the listening heaven.

Nothing in all creation is so like God as stillness.

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough, / A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou / Beside me singing in the Wilderness — / Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

So long as you cling to your fear of dying, you will hear neither the voice of life nor the voice of your soul. A tree says: My strength is trust. I know nothing about my fathers, I know nothing about the thousand children that every year spring out of me. I live out the secret of my seed to the very end, and I care for nothing else. I trust that God is in me. I trust that my labor is holy.

Now I will do nothing but listen, to accrue what I hear into this song, to let sounds contribute toward it.

Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky. We fell them down and turn them into paper, that we may record our emptiness.

Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one's own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist.

Nature, considered rationally, that is to say, submitted to the process of thought, is a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, however dissimilar in form and attributes; one great whole animated by the breath of life.

This world of dew / is only a world of dew — / and yet... and yet...

Great is this force of memory, excessive great, O my God; a large and boundless chamber! Who ever sounded the bottom thereof? Yet is this a power of mine, and belongs unto my nature; nor do I myself comprehend all that I am.

In this mortal frame of mine, which is made of a hundred bones and nine orifices, there is something, and this something is called a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name.

Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God. / It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; / it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil / Crushed.

In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows. Nature says, — he is my creature, and maugre all his impertinent griefs, he shall be glad with me. Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorizes a different state of the mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.

To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower / Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand / And Eternity in an hour.

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars.

Learn of the pine from the pine, and of the bamboo from the bamboo. To do so you must leave behind the self, and enter into the object, until its hidden glimmering shows itself and a poem forms of its own accord.

These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence.

Coming, going, the waterbirds don't leave a trace don't follow a path.

The love of Heaven and Earth is impartial, and they demand nothing from the myriad things. The love of the sages is impartial, and they demand nothing from the people. The cooperation between Heaven and Earth is much like how a bellows works! Within the emptiness there is limitless potential; in moving, it keeps producing without end. Complaining too much only leads to misfortune. It is better to stay in the center of serenity.

Man is a dream of a shadow. But when god-given brightness comes, a shining light rests on men, and life is sweet.