"Do not trust your memory; it is a net full of holes; the most beautiful prizes slip through it."

- Georges Duhamel, The Heart's Domain

"If these are the creatures, what must the creator be like?"

- St. Francis of Assisi looking at the stars, quoted by Richard Rohr

"Walking is the single best way to experience the here and now. It mimics the beating heart, a rhythm in which the body takes obvious delight. Walking is also the best place by which our senses can take in the world. We hear conversations, see faces, taste the humid air, sense a change in the weather."

- William Vitek, Preservation magazine, from The Utne editorial (November - December 2003)

"But I'll push myself up through the dirt and shake my petals free
I'm resolved to being born and so resigned to bravery."

- Dar Williams, Spring Street, The Green World

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

— Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.


Elizabeth Bishop The Complete Poems 1927-1979

Blessed are those who mourn; they shall be comforted.

Insight Information