Poetry Resources
The First Free Women- Poems of the Early Buddhist Nuns
How do you cross the flood?
You cross calmly – one step at a time,
feeling for stones.
Wendell Berry- “Being Watchful”
BEING WATCHFUL As soon as I felt a necessity to learn about the non-human world,I wished to learn about it in a hurry.And then I began to learn perhapsthe most important lesson that nature had to reach me:that I could not learn about her in a hurry.The most important...
Wendell Berry- “A Timbered Choir”
A TIMBERED CHOIR (excerpt)I go among trees and sit still.All my stirring becomes quiet around me like circles on water.My tasks lie in their places where I left them asleep like cattle.Then what is afraid of me comes and lives a while in my sight.What it fears in...
Emily Dickinson- “Nature”
“Nature” is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon
Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Danna Faulds
The call to deeper practice comes, and I respond before I catch myself.
All that I am is drawn inside as if pulled by the strongest tide, a current flowing in only one direction.
What does this practice look like?
Linda France
I’m lying down looking at the colour of sky falling through trees,
dreaming the real, tasting what it feels like to love it.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Our true home is in the present moment.
To live in the present moment is a miracle.
The miracle is not to walk on water.
Joy Harjo
Remember the sky that you were born under, know each of the star’s stories. Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the strongest point of time.
Kabir
Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine
rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
Vasant Lad
Just as there is a space between the clouds in the sky,
There is a space between your thoughts.
This space is the doorway to the divine.
Mark Nepo
When I can be the truth, It grows more and more clear.
When it is necessary to tell the truth.
That is, when I have access to the place within me that is lighted, I don’t have to speak heatedly.
John O’Donohue
Nearer to the earth’s heart,
Deeper within its silence:
Animals know this world In a way we never will.
We who are ever
Distanced and distracted
Mary Oliver
When the hummingbird sinks its face into the trumpet vine
and the funnels of the blossoms, and the tongue leaps out and throbs,
I am scorched to realize once again how many small,
Nancy Paddock
Lie down with your belly to the ground,
like an old dog in the sun.
Smell the greenness of the cloverleaf,
feel the damp earth through your clothes,
Craig Santos
I don’t love you as if you were rare earth metals,
diamonds, or reserves of crude oil that propagate war:
I love you as one loves most vulnerable things, urgently,
between the habitat and its loss.
David Sluyter
I awoke to the confusion of a new day.
The scraps of dreams, memories of yesterday, and new
Cravings creeping into awareness,
The sun spilling its light over all but the shadows and a Cacophony of sound
Lao Tzu
The Master sees things as they are,Without trying to control them.She lets them go their own way,And resides at the center of the circle. ****************************************************************** Do you have patience to waitTill your mud settles and the water...
Terry Tempest Williams
I pray to the birds. I pray to the birds because I believe they will carry the messages of my heart upward. I pray to them because I believe in their existence, the way their songs begin and end each day—the invocations and benedictions of Earth.
Alice Walker
We have a beautiful mother
Her hills are buffaloes
Her buffaloes hills
We have a beautiful mother
Walt Whitman
I exist as I am, that is enough,
If not other in the world be aware I sit content,
And if each and all be aware I sit content.
David Whyte
SOMETIMESSometimes if you move carefully through the forestBreathing like the onesin the old stories who could cross a shimmering bed of dry leaves without a sound,you come to a place whose only task is to trouble you with tinybut frightening requestsconceived out of...
