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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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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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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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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I travel as much as I do. It isn't the life I expected. I don't know what dust of pollen will come back with me from these travels.But I must trust that I will not treat frivolously the glimpses I've been given into other places and others' lives.
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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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Time ... brings us everything we have and are, then comes with a back-loader and starts taking it all away.
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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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At some point I realized that you don't get a full human life if you try to cut off one end of it, that you need to agree to the entire experience, to the full spectrum of what happens.
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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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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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The heft of a life in the hands grows both lighter and weightier. Over time, my life has become more saturated with its shape and made-ness, while my poems have become more and more free. The first word of every poem might be Yes. The next words: And then.
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Zen taught me how to pay attention, how to delve, how to question and enter, how to stay with -- or at least want to try to stay with -- whatever is going on.
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Within the silence, expansion, and sustained day by day concentration, I grow permeable.
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At another level, though, poems can craft an eraser - we can't revise the past, but poems allow us some malleability, an increased freedom of response, comprehension, feeling. Choice, what choices are possible for any given person, is another theme that's run through my work from the start.
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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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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 studio, like a poem, is an intimacy and a freedom you can look out from, into each part of your life and a little beyond.
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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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