POEMS & THOUGHTS

Poems & Thoughts

Mary Oliver – The Journey

One day you finally knew

what you had to do, and began,

though the voices around you

kept shouting

their bad advice—

though the whole house

began to tremble

and you felt the old tug

at your ankles.

“Mend my life!”

each voice cried.

But you didn’t stop.

You knew what you had to do,

though the wind pried

with its stiff fingers

at the very foundations,

though their melancholy

was terrible.

It was already late

enough, and a wild night,

and the road full of fallen

branches and stones.

But little by little,

as you left their voices behind,

the stars began to burn

through the sheets of clouds,

and there was a new voice

which you slowly

recognized as your own,

that kept you company

as you strode deeper and deeper

into the world, determined to do the only

thing you could do

determined to save the only life you could save.

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Rumi – Guest House

This being human is a guest house Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness

comes as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still treat each guest honorably.

He may be clearing you out for some new delight. The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

The World As I See It – Albert Einstein

“How strange is the lot of us mortals! Each of us is here for a brief sojourn; for what purpose (we) know not,

though (we) sometimes thinks (we) sense it…

A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life are based on the labors of other(s),

living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving…

“My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my

pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities.

I am truly a ‘lone traveler’ …I have never lost a …need for solitude…”

“My political ideal is democracy…The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling.

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate…it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute true religiosity. In this sense, and only this sense, I am a deeply religious man… I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”