Exploring the neighborhood

“I am no scientist. I explore the neighborhood. An infant who has just
learned to hold up his head has a frank and forthright way of gazing
about him in bewilderment. He hasn’t the faintest clue where he is, and
he aims to find out. In a couple of years, what he will have learned
instead is how to fake it: he’ll have the cocksure air of a squatter who
has come to feel he owns the place. Some unwonted, taught pride
diverts us from our original intent, which is to explore the
neighborhood, view the landscape, to discover at least where it is that
we have been so startlingly set down, if we can’t learn why."  - Annie Dillard (Pilgrim  at Tinker's Creek)

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

- Mary Oliver ("The Summer Day," New and Selected Poems)

More and more I have come to admire resilience.

Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam

returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous

tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,

it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.

But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,

mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.

- Jane Hirshfield ("Optimism," Given Sugar, Given Salt)

"There is but one world and everything that is imaginable is necessary
to it. For this world also which seems to us a thing of stone and flower
and blood is not a thing at all but is a tale. And all in it is a tale
and each tale the sum of all lesser tales and yet these are also the
selfsame tale and contain as well all else within them. So everything is
necessary. Every least thing. This is the hard lesson. Nothing can be
dispensed with. Nothing despised. Because the seams are hid from us, you
see. The joinery. The way in which the world is made. We have no way to
know what could be taken away. What omitted. We have no way to tell
what might stand and what might fall. And those seams that are hid from
us are of course in the tale itself and the tale has no abode or place
of being except in the telling only and there it lives and makes its
home and therefore we can never be done with the telling. Of the telling
there is no end. And . . . in whatever . . . place by whatever . . .
name or by no name at all . . . all tales are one. Rightly heard all
tales are one."   - Cormac McCarthy (The Crossing)

''To see that your life is a story while you're in the middle of living it may be a help to living it well."   - Ursula K. Le Guin (Gifts)