quotations and poetry

“Everything slows down when we listen and stop trying to fix the unfixable.”

-Anne Lamott, Hallelujah Anyway

The hardest thing in the world: Just listening.  Just being there.  Not trying to fix. Abiding.

One can learn to be alert to the extraordinary and press pause – to memorize moments of the everyday.

– Bill Hayes, Insomniac City

Life moves on, whether we act as cowards or heroes. Life has no other discipline to impose, if we would but realize it, than to accept life unquestioningly. Everything we shut our eyes to, everything we run away from, everything we deny, denigrate or despise, serves to defeat us in the end.

What seems nasty, painful, evil, can become a source of beauty, joy and strength, if faced with an open mind. Every moment is a golden one for him who has the vision to recognize it as such.

It will always be confusing to think that that which is terrible and that which is beautiful have the same materials to work with: the brick and mortar and earth and stars of our immediate world. There is that which can kill us, and that which will save us, and we live among them, struggling to discern our way through. And it is terrifying, my love. It has never stopped being terrifying.

– Stephanie Saldana, A Country Between

Simone Weil wrote, “All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.”

I had spent years trying to understand what she meant, but I think I was beginning to comprehend now – that there are those supernatural physics that allow for a flower to be stronger than an entire war. We can call that flower beauty, or grace, or hope. What is sure is that which is beautiful not only saves us, but it also belongs to the eternal, while the terrible passes away. Borders do not last. The names of countries do not last. And the names of flowers, they, too, do not last. But flowers themselves remain. Music remains. Certain phrases from childhood, sewn into our memories, passed down imperceptibly in the way we speak to children, they also remain, and will continue to after we are gone.

Childbirth remains.

Lemon trees. Fig trees. Stories remain.

I had seen jars from the Roman period, unexpectedly lifted up from the bowels of the sea, intact, after two thousand years.

Love remains, above all.

That night, while my husband and son were sleep in their beds, I made a list of what lasts: snowdrops and periwinkles, lullabies and prayers. And I knew that we don’t just carry beauty but that we cling to it, as a resistance against gravity. That perhaps, in the ed, that is the single task we must set out to do in our lives

– Stephanie Saldana, A Country Between