Quote

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.

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
Grows
Clamorous
Around
Unplug
Ever
Emerges
Going
Quietly
Long
Forest
Time
Forests
Life
Hunger
World
Silence

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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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Poetry's task is to increase the available stock of reality, R P Blackmur said.
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What lives in words is what words were needed to learn.
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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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Self carries grief as a pack mule carries the side bags, being careful between the trees to leave extra room.
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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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Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough.
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The writing of an assay-type poem or a poem investigating perspective isn't an exercise of rational or strategic mind. Poems for me are acts of small or large desperation. They grapple with surfaces too steep to walk in any other way, yet which have to be traveled.
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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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There is no paradise, no place of true completion that does not include within its walls the unknown.
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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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