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Old men ought to be explorers
here or there does not matter

we must be still and still moving
into another intensity
for a further union, a deeper communion
through the dark cold and the empty desolation,
the wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters
of the petrel and the porpoise.

In my end is my beginning.
 

~ T. S. Eliot
excerpt from East Coker V
Four Quartets


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Four Quartets



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via whiskey river 
image via ELEMENOP


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if you want ...

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If you want to become whole, let yourself be partial.

If you want to become straight, let yourself be crooked.

If you want to become full, let yourself be empty.

If you want to be reborn, let yourself die.

If you want to be given everything, give everything up.

—Tao Te Ching

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The Deer

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You never know.

The body of night opens

like a river, it drifts upward like white smoke,

like so many wrappings of mist.

And on the hillside two deer are walking along

just as though this wasn't

the owned, tilled earth of today

but the past.

I did not see them the next day, or the next,

but in my mind's eye -

there they are, in the long grass,

like two sisters.

This is the earnest work. Each of us is given

only so many mornings to do it -

to look around and love

the oily fur of our lives,

the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.

Days I don't do this

I feel the terror of idleness,

like a red thirst.

Death isn't just an idea.

When we die the body breaks open

like a river;

the old body goes on, climbing the hill.

–Mary Oliver

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Here I am trying to live, or rather,
I am trying to teach the death within me how to live.

—Jean Cocteau



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