Quote

Everything has two endings- a horse, a piece of string, a phone call. Before a life, air. And after. As silence is not silence, but a limit of hearing.

Jane Hirshfield

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Jane Hirshfield
Age: 71
Born: 1953
Born: February 24
Climate Activist
Essayist
Linguist
Poet
Translator
Writer
Manhattan borough
New York City
Life
Horse
Endings
Air
String
Limits
Strings
Pieces
Limit
Silence
Phone
Call
Phones
Two
Hearing
Everything
Piece

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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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I need more and more silence, it feels. Poems don't leap into my mind when I'm distracted, turned outward, with other people, listening to music.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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How sad they are, the promises we never return to. They stay in our mouths, roughen the tongue, lead lives of their own.
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You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
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The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together.
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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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Art keeps its newness because it's at once unforgettable and impossible to remember entirely. Art is too volatile, multiple and evaporative to hold on to. It's more chemical reaction, one you have to re-create each time, than a substance. Art's discoveries are also, almost always, counter to ordinary truths.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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