Author: Tim

• Mary Oliver: “What wretchedness…”

  “What wretchedness, to believe only in what can be proven.” – Mary Oliver, from the poem “I Looked Up”.

• Mary Oliver: “To pay attention…”

  “To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.” – Mary Oliver, from the poem “YES! NO!

• The Time Toggle

  \[[Alienation and the feeling of time]] Work over a drawing or a poem and all sense of passing time is suspended.   The next day, watch television all evening, and you’re surprised at how fast the evening goes.   These are common observations, common enough that we can state the principle: when the senses are…

• Helen Vendler, on Gerard M. Hopkins: “…second-order reflection…”

  “The subjects that interested Hopkins were chiefly intellectual ones; even his most sensuous responses to the natural world were immediately referred to the intellect, which, in the poetry, meant referral to philosophical or theological thought. Although it has seemed regrettable to some readers that Hopkins grafted religious sestets onto octaves of natural beauty, it must…

• Mary Oliver: from her poem “Sometimes”

  ….4. Instructions for living a life: Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it. …. From the poem “Sometimes”.

• Mary Oliver: from her poem “Praying”.

  …It doesn’t have to be the blue iris, it could be weeds in a vacant lot, or a few small stones; just pay attention, then patch a few words together and don’t try to make them elaborate, this isn’t a contest but the doorway into thanks, and a silence in which another voice may speak.

• Shakespeare: from the end of King Lear

  So we’ll live, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh At gilded butterflies… And take upon’s the mystery of things, As if we were God’s spies.

• John V. Taylor: Poem…“Over the swinging parapet…”

  Over the swinging parapet of my arm your sentinel eyes lean gazing. Hugely alert on the pale unfinished clay of your infant face, they drink light from this candle on the tree. Drinking, not pondering, each bright thing you see, you make it yours without analysis and, stopping down the aperture of thought to a…

• Ann Lewin, poem on prayer

  Prayer is like watching for the Kingfisher. All you can do is Be there where he is likely to appear, and Wait. Often, nothing much happens; There is space, silence, and expectancy. No visible sign, only the Knowledge that he’s been there, And may come again. Seeing or not seeing cease to matter, You have…

• Walter Breuggemann: On Land As Inheritance

  Moses understands, as do the prophets after him, that being in the land poses for Israel a conflict between two economic systems, each of which views the land differently. On the one hand, the land is regarded as property and possession to be bought and sold and traded and used. On the other hand, in…