Fear and Love

 

Audre Lorde

https://insig.ht/N2WK1BnKC5b

Do Stones Feel? ~ Mary Oliver

 

Do Stones Feel? by Mary Oliver

September 11, 2025 / Cadie

Do stones feel?
Do they love their life?
Or does their patience drown out everything else?

When I walk on the beach I gather a few
white ones, dark ones, the multiple colors.
Don't worry, I say, I'l bring you back, and I do.

Is the tree as it rises delighted with its many branches, 
each one like a poem?

Are the clouds glad to unburden their bundles of rain?

Most of the world says no, no, it's not possible.

I refuse to think to such a conclusion.
Too terrible it would be, to be wrong.

("Do Stones Feel?" by Mary Oliver, printed in Devotions 2017)

Shantideva, Han Shan, Oliver - Familiarizing myself with the context of my habits with Wikiquote resources from Hanshan

 

Shantideva

"There is nothing that does not grow easier through familiarity."

Habit change through gentle, compassionate attention to the context of my suffering... instead of avoidance.  

https://bodhicitta.tsadra.org/index.php/Explore/Chapter_6_-_Patience 

Working on understanding Shantideva and others who celebrate 'familiarizing myself' with the nature of my suffering, the context, ... instead of running from it. 

Here is a link to a nascient chat on this topic:  https://chatgpt.com/share/6a693bdf-c3f0-83ea-8c66-70e080202e0b

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Hanshan

From the text at link above

• As for me, I delight in the every day Way
  Among mist-wrapped vines and rocky caves
  Here in the wilderness I am completely free
  With my friends, the white clouds, idling forever
  There are roads, but they do not reach the world
  Since I am mindless, who can rouse my thoughts
  On a bed of stone I sit, alone in the night
  While a round moon climbs up Cold Mountain

Sometimes
Mary Oliver

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
    or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
    a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
    some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometimes
melancholy leaves me breathless.

3.

Later I was in a field full of sunflowers.
I was feeling the head of midsummer.
I was thinking of the sweet, electric
    drowse of creation,

when it began to break.

In the west, clouds gathered.
Thunderheads.
In an hour the sky was filled with them.

In an hour the sky was filled
    with the sweetness of rain and the blast of lightning.
Followed by the deep bells of thunder.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
    but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again—
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably—
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
    one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

A ship in harbor is safe, ….

 

https://insig.ht/HiZi22eW24b

The Buddha on the mind

 

https://insig.ht/S6alv7pXY4b

Morning by Mary Oliver

 https://shorturl.at/cirJC

Mary Oliver‘s home titled ‘morning’

From an AI analysis:

The poem ends with Oliver standing in an ordinary kitchen, watching a cat, and suddenly recognizing the abundance already present in the moment. For someone recovering from adversity, the healing here is gentle rather than dramatic: not a thunderbolt, but a rediscovery of the ordinary world’s quiet sufficiency. 

insight on change

 

THE MOMENT OF CHANGE IS THE ONLY POEM.

Adrienne Rich

Daily insight quote from Insight Timer on July 15, 2026

A young seeker asked an old monk, “Master, when does a life truly change?”

The monk poured a bowl of water into the dry earth.

“Was it the last drop,” he asked, “or the first that disappeared into the ground?”

The seeker stood in silence.

The monk smiled. “Change begins in a moment too small to notice, yet nothing is ever the same after it.” 💕

Yes, whenever one of our illusions breaks, whenever the heart opens with simplicity, whenever complaints turn into gratitude, fear into trust, and ego into humility, whenever we see ourselves, understand ourselves, whenever we accept someone just as they are, without any judgment, and listen to them, whenever our way of seeing changes, and the same people, the same paths, the same day, the same sky appear to us in a new color, in a new meaning.

Whenever we see that peace is not in circumstances, but in consciousness; love is not something to be demanded, but a way of being; life is not something to hold onto, but to flow with it in awareness.

Whenever we are no longer the same as before, that very moment becomes the only living, true, and great poem, which is written by the pen of realization on the paper of the heart 💛✨

Tao Yuanming: Returning to Fields and Gardens

 https://poets.org/poem/returning-fields-and-gardens-i

Returning to Fields and Gardens (I)

Tao Yuanming

Translated from the Mandarin by Arthur Sze

When I was young, I did not fit in
with others, and simply loved the hills and mountains.
By mistake, I fell into the dusty net,
and before I knew it, it was thirty years!
The caged bird longs for the old forest.
The fish in the pond misses the old depths.
I cultivate land along the southern wilds,
and, keeping to simplicity, return to fields and garden.
Ten acres now surround my house;
it is thatched, and has eight, nine rooms.
Elms and willows shade the back eaves.
Peach and plum trees are lined out the front hall.
The distant village is hazy, hazy: and
slender, slender, the smoke hanging over houses.
Dogs bark in the deep lane, and a rooster
crows on top of a mulberry tree.
My house untouched by the dust of the world—
ample leisure in these bare rooms.
I was held so long inside a narrow bird-
cage, but now, at last, can return to nature.

From The Silk Dragon II: Translations of Chinese Poetry by Arthur Sze. Copyright © 2024 by Arthur Sze. Reprinted with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC, on behalf of Copper Canyon Press.