The Inner Valley

Something is being told in the woods: aisles of shadow lead away; a branch waves; a pencil of sunlight slowly travels its path. A withheld presence almost speaks, but then retreats, rustles a patch of brush. You can feel the centuries ripple generations of wandering, discovering, being lost and found, eating, dying, being born. A walk through the forest strokes your fur, the fur you no longer have. And your gaze down a forest aisle is a strange, long plunge, dark eyes looking for home. For delicious minutes you can feel your whiskers wider than your mind, away out over everything.    ******* ✎ William Edgar Stafford (Hutchinson, Kansas, 17 January 1914 – Lake Oswego, Oregon, 28 August 1993). ◙ Artwork: Iván Ivánovich Shishkin.

The washing never gets done. The furnace never gets heated. Books never get read. Life is never completed. Life is like a ball which one must continually catch and hit so it won't fall. When the fence is repaired at one end, it collapses on the other. The roof leaks, the kitchen door won't close, there are cracks in the foundation, the torn knees of children's pants … One can't keep everything in mind. The wonder is that beside all this one can notice the spring which is so full of everything continuing in all directions - into the evening clouds, into the redwing's song and into every drop of dew on every blade of grass in the meadow, as far as the eye can see, into the dusk . ******* ✎   Jaan Kaplinski  (Tartu, Estonia, born 22 January 194 1). ◙ Artwork: Richard Diebenkorn

Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep, He hath awakened from the dream of life; 'Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep With phantoms an unprofitable strife, And in mad trance, strike with our spirit's knife Invulnerable nothings. -We decay Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief Convulse us and consume us day by day, And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay. ******* ✎  Percy Bysshe Shelley  (Horsham, Sussex, England, 4 August 1792 ~ Gulf of  La Spezia, Kingdom of Sardinia, 8 July 1822). ◙ Artwork: William Blake.

"Just as I do not exist without the world, I am not myself without transcendence. … I stand before transcendence, which does not occur to me as existing in the world of phenomenal things but speaks to me as possible – speaks to me in the voice of whatever exists, and most decidedly in that of my self-being. The transcendence before which I stand is the measure of my own depth." ******* ✎ Karl Jaspers (Oldenburg, German Empire, 23 February 1883 - Basel, Switzerland, 26 February 1969) ◙ Artwork: Caspar David Friedrich

I t’s distance that makes mountains mountains. Looked at closely, they start to resemble me. Vast panoramas stop people in their tracks and make them conscious of the engulfing distances. Those very distances make people the people they are. Yet people can also contain distances inside themselves, which is why they go on yearning… They soon find they’re just places violated by distances, and no longer observed. They have then become scenery. ******* ✎ Shuntaro  Tanikawa (Tokyo, Japan, 15 December 1931) ◙  Artwork: Daniel O'Neill