Peace

by Sara Teasdale

Peace flows into me
  As the tide to the pool by the shore;
  It is mine forevermore,
It will not ebb like the sea.

I am the pool of blue
  That worships the vivid sky;
  My hopes were heaven-high,
They are fulfilled in you.

I am the pool of gold
  When sunset burns and dies --
  You are my deepening skies;
Give me your stars to hold.

O Mistress Mine

by "William Shakespeare"

O MISTRESS mine, where are you roaming?
O stay and hear! your true-love’s coming
That can sing both high and low;
Trip no further, pretty sweeting,
Journeys end in lovers’ meeting—	5
Every wise man’s son doth know.
What is love? ’tis not hereafter;
Present mirth hath present laughter;
What’s to come is still unsure:
In delay there lies no plenty,—	10
Then come kiss me, Sweet-and-twenty,
Youth’s a stuff will not endure.

What I Believe

What I Believe
by Michael Blumenthal

I believe there is no justice,
but that cottongrass and bunchberry
grow on the mountain.

I believe that a scorpion's sting
will kill a man,
but that his wife will remarry.

I believe that, the older we get,
the weaker the body,
but the stronger the soul.

I believe that if you roll over at night
in an empty bed,
the air consoles you.

I believe that no one is spared
the darkness,
and no one gets all of it.

I believe we all drown eventually
in a sea of our making,
but that the land belongs to someone else.

I believe in destiny.
And I believe in free will.

I believe that, when all
the clocks break,
time goes on without them.

And I believe that whatever
pulls us under,
will do so gently,

so as not to disturb anyone,
so as not to interfere
with what we believe in.

The Peace of Wild Things

The Peace of Wild Things

by Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

More Hitchens . . .

. . . this time on the general desirability of mental / emotional strife:

It's often been observed that the major religions can give no convincing account of Paradise.  They do much better representing Hell; indeed one of the early Christian dogmatists, Tertullian, borrowed the vividness of the latter to lend point to the former.  Among the delights of Heaven, he decided, would be the contemplation of the tortures of the damned.  This anthropomorphism at least had a bite to it; the problem in all other cases [of our attempts to envision a convincing Paradise] is that nobody can seriously desire the dissolution of the intellect.  And the pleasures and rewards of the intellect are inseparable from angst, uncertainty, conflict and even despair.

Who would want their "Heaven"?  Life without struggle is not life.  It's a coma.  I ask again, who would want that?

Hitchens On Rilke On Eros

"The other positive and affirmative element in Rilke is his approach to Eros.  He had a high intuition about sex, both as a liberating force and also as the best riposte to the foul suggestions of death.  His seven so-called Phallic Poems are among the best non-love verses since the brave days of Marvell and the Metaphysicals; they openly announce that fucking is its own justification."

from Letters to a Young Contrarian, 2001.

Happy Valentine's Day

You are my heart's true desire, my ideal woman, and the real love of my life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ghZt2cILcCU

(Sorry about the annoying ads.  It's the "official" video so there's no way around it.)