I should be content

to look at a mountain

for what it is 

and not as a comment

on my life.

- David Ignatow

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Her sleep was everything.

The trees I'd always loved, these distances that we

can almost touch, the pastures I felt so much,

and every miracle I found in myself

- Rainer Maria Rilke

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It is good knowing that glasses

are to drink from;

the bad thing is not to know 

what thirst is for.

- Machado

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Without the energy that lifts mountains,

how am I to live?

- Mirabai

Human consciousness feels the gap between themselves and the universe.

How much consciousness is the poet willing to grant to trees or hills or living creatures not a part of his own species? Every city culture feels the gap between himself and nature. When the gap develops, the human being changes.

Human beings are eaters of consciousness, hungry for it ; why leave the house if you' re convinced  there is consciousness only inside your house, or inside your own species?  Poets says that if you make the effort to use your entire imaginative power to see, par example, one tree, you've essentially granted the whole world its being, Giving yourself to that one tree is crucial. But it involves imaginative labor, and that labor cannot be done by the collective. Each person has to do it alone.

'A larger than human consciousness operating in the universe.'

Full  consciousness

You are carrying me, full consciousness,

God that has desires, all through the world.

Here, in this third sea, I almost hear your voice: your voice,

the wind, filling entirely all movements;

Sea colors and sea lights.

Your voice of white fire

in the universe of water, the ship, the sky,

marking out the roads with delight,

engraving for me with a blazing light my firm orbit:

a black body

with the glowing diamond in its center.

- Juan Ramon  Jimenez

'I had to make you uncomfortable, otherwise you never would have moved.' - Universe

---------

Rebirth

Corridors of the soul! The soul that is like a young woman!

You clear light

and the brief history

and the joy of a new life......

Oh turn and be born again, and walk the road,

and find once more the lost path!

And turn and feel in our own hand

The warth of the good hand

of our mother.... And walk through life in dreams

out of love of the hand that leads us.

In our soul everything

moves guided by a mysterious hand:

Ununderstandable, not speaking,

we know nothing of our own souls.

The deepest words

of the wise men teach us

the same as the whistle of the wind when it bliws,

or the sound of the water when it is flowing.

- Antonio Machado

'Left out to die on the mountains of the heart.'

---------

About the locked- in situation of our life:

Whoever you are: some evening take a step

Out of your house, which you know so well.

Enormous space is near, your house lies where  it begins,

whoever you are.

Your eyes find it hard to tear themselves

from the sloping threshold, but with your eyes

slowly, slowwly, lift one black tree

up, so it stands against the sky: skinny, alone.

With that you have made the world. The world is immense,

and like a word that is still growing in the silence.

In the same moment that your will grasps it,

your eyes feeling its subtlety will leave it...

- Rainer Maria Rilke

'Mass culture encourages the comfort of not-seeing.'

Self- expression is the source of all abasement, just as, contrawise, it is the basis for all true elevation. The first step is introspection - exclusive comtemplation of the self. But whoever stops there goes only half way. The second step must be genuine observation outward - spontaneous, sober observation of the external world.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after

so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes,

that a storm is coming,

and I hear the far-off fields say things

I can't bear without a friend,

I can't love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on

across the woods and across time,

and the world looks as if it had no age:

the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,

is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!

What fights with us is so great!

If only we would let ourselves be dominated

as things do by some immense storm,

we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it's with small things,

and the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal

does not want to bent by us.

I mean the angel, who appeared

by the wrestler's of the Old Testament:

when the wrestler's sinews

grew long like metal strings,

he felt them under his fingers

like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel,

( who often simply declined the fight),

went away proud and strengthened

and great from that harsh hand,

that kneaded him as if to change his shape,

Winning does not tempt that man,

This is how he grows; by being defeated, decisively,

by constantly greater beings.

- Rainer Maria Rilke

I believe we think more  deeply about the universe when we're falling in love. I think the mysterious pull that draws you to another person is identical to the one that moves our eyes upward to the stars.

In many ways, a book is, in itself, a tiny universe. Each page is like a newly formed galaxy, fashioned from a single , pulsing thought. A book travels for days, for years, sometimes for centuries to meet you at an exact point in time.

- Lang Leav

I can see it so clearly - the greater plan. I understand that I am both the architect and tenant of my destruction. I can feel it so acutely like an ache in my chest, knowing ultimately that I am lockedinto a chain of events that I cannot stop, an outcome I cannot alter, feeling at once helpless yet hopelessly awed by the power of my part in this beautifull, brutal expression of the Universe.

- Lang Leav