Ernest Hemingway's 'The Old Man and the Sea', has to be one of the most accomplished accounts of a lifetime's intimacy with the sea.
Tag: Silence
Billy Collins – The Dead
Billy Collins runs with the folkloric notion that the dead are watching us and pushes the image all the way to a reverie of the departed 'rowing themselves slowly through eternity' in glass-bottomed boats.
Their Love of Life Should Never Weaken
Pursuing our vocations and allowing our children the space to develop their own, are, according to Natalia Ginzburg, paramount in raising healthy children and developing healthy relationships with them as they grow.
Seamus Heaney – The Peninsula
Seamus Heaney's beautiful poem about where we go when we leave our heads and dig into something more fundamental.
Elizabeth Alexander – Equinox
Alexander's poem Equinox is about life and energy, and how it slowly disappears, sometimes the force leaving the body still living, but an empty shell.
Erich von Hungen – The Moment
The pinpoint perspective of the present moment can feel so sharp but ultimately always impossible to fathom and out of our reach. As Erich von Hungen writes, it is simultaneously hard and soft, early and late, tiny and all-encompassing 'like a pocket-sized Big Bang.'
Pablo Neruda – Keeping Quiet
'Let's stop for one second,' wrote Pablo Neruda in a poetic manifesto for the very personal and very political act of doing nothing. He imagined the world stopping to catch its breath for a moment, and the 'sudden strangeness' that would emerge.
Start Where You Are: Ajahn Sumedho
"Whatever way you are feeling now, whether you like it or not, whether it is inspired or depressed, right or wrong, sane or crazy, it is what it is in this moment."
Walt Whitman – When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer
When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer encapsulates Walt Whitman's approach to the world: silent, solitary and mystical.
Chuang Tzu’s Action and Non-Action
The true stillness that is at the root of human wisdom and the Taoist endeavor is a positive state, in as much as it is not the absence of anything nor a resistance to anything. Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, author of foundational Taoist texts, writes in this poem: "The sage is quiet because he is not… Continue reading Chuang Tzu’s Action and Non-Action