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History, mythology, and folktales are filled with stories of people punished for saying the truth. Only the Fool, exempt from society's rules, is allowed to speak with complete freedom.

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
Freedom
Mythology
History
Allowed
Speak
Complete
Stories
Rules
Truth
Filled
People
Fool
Folktales
Saying
Exempt
Society
Punished

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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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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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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.
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I want to understand the piers of language and music and comprehension that can hold up a building even when what the building houses is an earthquake. This thinking must surely come into the poems I write, but more by osmosis than will.
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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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Metaphors think with the imagination and the senses. The hot chili peppers in them explode in the mouth and the mind.
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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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The trick, though, is to not lose compassion, to not allow the sense of absurdity to outweigh the awareness of real beings, with real feelings. Mean-spirited humor turns the world into cardboard, the way Midas's simple-minded greed turned food into inedible and useless stuff.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.
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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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The pressed oil of words can blaze up into music, into image, into the heart and mind's knowledge. The lit and shadowed places within us can be warmed.
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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.
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The ability to name poetry's gestures and rhetorics isn't required to write or read them, any more than a painter needs to know the physics of color to bring forward a landscape. The eye and hand and ear know what they need to know. Some of us want to know more, because knowing pleases.
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Neither a person entirely broken nor one entirely whole can speak. In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble.
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