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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.

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
Stay
Leave
Food
Open
Enter
Enough
Cat
Long
Door
Doors

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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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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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One breath taken completely one poem, fully written, fully read - in such a moment, anything can happen.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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A poem can use anything to talk about anything.
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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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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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The moonlight builds its cold chapel again out of piecemeal darkness.
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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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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
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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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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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Isn't the small and common the field we live our life in? The large comes into a life through small-paned windows. A breath is small, but everything depends on it. A person looks at you a single, brief moment longer than is necessary, and everything is changed. The smaller the clue, the larger the meaning, it sometimes feels.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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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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