Category: My Commonplace Book

• Meister Eckhart: “…I cannot be a heretic…”

  “I can be in error, but I cannot be a heretic, because the first belongs to the intellect, the second to the will.”

• Mary Oliver: “A poem should always have birds in it.”

  “A poem should always have birds in it.” From her poem “Singapore”, from the collection “House Of Light” (1990).

• C.S. Lewis: “…what you see and hear…depends on what sort of person you are.”

  “For what you see and hear depends a good deal on where you are standing: it also depends on what sort of person you are.”   C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew

• Mary Oliver: “…with your one wild and precious life.”

  “…I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I don’t 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…

• Mary Oliver: “When it’s over…”

  When it’s over I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,…

• 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!

• 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.