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Here is an amazement—once I was twenty years old and in every motion of my body there was a delicious ease, and in every motion of the green earth there was a hint of paradise, and now I am sixty years old, and it is the same.
What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?
Language is, in other words, not necessary, but voluntary. If it were necessary, it would have stayed simple; it would not agitate our hearts with ever-present loveliness and ever-cresting ambiguity; it would not dream, on its long white bones, of turning into song.
Do you think this world is only an entertainment for you? Never to enter the sea and notice how the water divides with perfect courtesy, to let you in! Never to lie down on the grass, as though you were the grass! Never to leap to the air as you open your wings over the dark acorn of your heart! No wonder we hear, in your mournful voice, the complaint that something is missing from your life!
who will care, who will chide you if you wander away from wherever you are, to look for your soul?
To sit down, like a weed among weeds, and rustle in the wind!
Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life? While the soul, after all, is only a window, and the opening of the window no more difficult than the wakening from a little sleep.
Meanwhile, once in a while, I have chanced, among the quick things, upon the immutable.
That was then, which hasn’t ended yet.
I climb. I backtrack. I float. I ramble my way home.
