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Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

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
Oils
Vinegar
Oil
Solitude
Wrong
Soul
Right

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And when two people have loved each other see how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud how the black cord makes of them a single fabric that nothing can tear or mend.
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Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes everything is connected pay attention.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.
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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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Something looks back from the trees, and knows me for who I am.
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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.
Jane Hirshfield
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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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A person is full of sorrow the way a burlap sack is full of stones or sand.
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How silently the heart pivots on its hinge.
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Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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So few the grains of happiness measured against all the dark and still the scales balance.
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Life is short. But desire, desire is long.
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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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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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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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As this life is not a gate, but the horse plunging through it.
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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
Jane Hirshfield