Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective

“No guarantees in this life.”

When a recent bout of illness sent me sulking with indignant disappointment at the ruin of long laid plans, I had to remind myself that we were never promised any of this; that it is hubris and self-importance and almost touching delusion to expect an indifferent cosmos to bend to our will, our wishes, and our plans; that meeting the universe on its own terms is the end of suffering.

Through the haze of what Virginia Woolf called the “wastes and deserts of the sou...