Amber husk
fluted with gold,
fruit on the sand
marked with a rich grain,
treasure
spilled near the shrub-pines
to bleach on the boulders:
your stalk has caught root
among wet pebbles
and drift flung by the sea
and grated shells
and split conch-shells.
Beautiful, wide-spread,
fire upon leaf,
what meadow yields
so fragrant a leaf
as your bright leaf?

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,
Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,
The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,
The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,
The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand
singing on the steamboat deck,
The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,
The wood-cutter’s song, the ploughboy’s on his way in the morning, or
at noon intermission or at sundown,
The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of
the girl sewing or washing,
Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,
The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows,
robust, friendly,
Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie. —C. G. Jung 

What I am saying in this letter amounts to this. Let us try to master the mystey of technique to such an extent that people are deceived by it and will swear by all that is holy that we have no technique. Let our work be so savant that it seems naïve and does not stink of our sapience.

Vincent Van Gogh, letter to Amice Raspard, April 1884

Either you look at the universe as a very poor creation out of which no one can make anything, or you look at your own life and your own part in the universe as infinitely rich, full of inexhaustible interest, opening out into infinite further possibilities for study and contemplation and praise. Beyond all and in all is God.

Perhaps the book of life, in the end, is the book of what one has lived, and if one has lived nothing, one is not in the book of life.

Thomas Merton, journal entry, 7.17.57

To be opaque and dense with opinion, with passion, with need, with hate, with power, is to be not there, to be absent, to nonexist…This is hell on earth and hell in hell. This is the hell I have to keep out of.

Thomas Merton, 6.22.66 journal entry

Being an artist means, not reckoning and counting, but ripening like the tree which does not force its sap and stands confident in the storms of spring without the fear that after them may come no summer. It does come. But it comes only to the patient, who are there as though eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly still and wide. I learn it daily, learn it with pain to which I am grateful: patience is everything! – Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The path to heaven lies through heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven. – Dorothy Day