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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.

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
Dark
Happiness
Stills
Grains
Still
Measured
Grain
Scales
Balance
Joy

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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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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.
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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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In the dream life you don't deliberately set out to dream about a house night after night the dream itself insists you look at whatever is trying to come into visibility.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.
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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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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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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.
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