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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
Oil
Solitude
Wrong
Soul
Right
Oils
Vinegar

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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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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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Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement.
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At some unnoticed moment, I began to understand that a life is written in indelible ink.
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Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.
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Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life.
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Poems . . . are perfume bottles momentarily unstopped - what they release is volatile and will vanish, and yet it can be released again.
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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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You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life.
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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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as some strings, untouched, sound when no one is speaking. So it was when love slipped inside us.
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How fragile we are, between the few good moments.
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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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Leave a door open long enough, a cat will enter. Leave food, it will stay.
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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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How fine is the mesh of death. You can almost see through it.
Jane Hirshfield
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You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight.
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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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This garden is no metaphor - more a task that swallows you into itself, earth using, as always, everything it can.
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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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