B e n e d i c t o :


May your trails be crooked,
  
   winding, lonesome,

dangerous, leading to the most amazing
  
   view.

May your rivers flow without end,

meandering through pastoral valleys
  
   tinkling with bells,

past temples and castles and poets' towers

into a dark primeval forest where tigers
  
   belch and monkeys howl,

through miasmal and mysterious swamps
  
   and down into a desert of red rock,

blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and
  
    grottos of endless stone,

and down again into a deep vast ancient
  
   unknown chasm

where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled
  
    cliffs,

where deer walk across the white sand
  
   beaches,

where storms come and go

as lightning clangs upon the high crags,

where something strange and more beautiful

and more wonderful than your deepest
  
   dreams

waits for you-

beyond the next turning of the canyon
  
   walls.    





-Edward Abbey (1927 - 1989)

"If a label is required, say I am one who loves the unfenced country"






 

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be 

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.



Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the

Indian in a white poncho lies dead

by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed

through the night

with plans and the simple breath

that kept him alive.



Before you know kindness

as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.



Then it is only kindness

that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day

to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.



-Naomi Shihab Nye

The time

I thought I could not

go any closer to grief

without dying



I went closer

and I did not die.

Surely God
 
had His hand in this,



as well as friends,

Still, I was bent,

and my laughter,

as the poet said,



was nowhere to be found.

Then said my friend Daniel

(brave even among lions),

"It's not the weight you carry



but how you carry it--

books, bricks, grief--

it's all in the way

you embrace it, balance it, carry it



when you cannot, and would not,

put it down."

So I went practicing.

Have you noticed?



Have you heard the laughter 

that comes, now and again,

out of my startled mouth?



How I linger

to admire, admire, admire

the things of this world

that are kind, and maybe



also troubled--

roses in the wind,

the sea geese on the steep wave,

a love

to which there is no reply?





- Mary Oliver