Tag: May Sarton

Saturday Morning

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lights-holiday-christmas

It’s a season when one gets spread out almost too thin in too many human directions, but come January first I am determined to batten myself down, tighten up, go inward. I feel the day must be marked by a change of rhythm, by some quiet act of self-determination and self-assertion. Everyone earns such a day after the outpourings of Christmas. We are overextended. Time to pull in the boundaries and lift the drawbridge.

~ May Sarton, The House by the Sea: A Journal

 

Photo: Kevin Farris (via Your Eyes Blaze Out)

It’s been a long day

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rainy-evenings-red-hair-bird-in-hand

The phoebe sits on her nest
Hour after hour,
Day after day,
Waiting for life to burst out
From under her warmth.
Can I weave a nest of silence,
weave it of listening,
listening, listening,
Layer upon layer?
But one must first become small,
Nothing but a presence,
Attentive as a nesting bird,
Proffering no slightest wish
Toward anything
that might happen or be given,
Only the warm, faithful waiting,
contained in one’s smallness.
Beyond the question,
the silence.
Before the answer,
the silence.

~ May Sarton, from Beyond the Question, A Grain of Mustard Seed: Poems

Notes:

Heigh-Ho, Heigh-Ho, it’s off to work I go

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dancer-dust-cloud

After I had looked for a while at that daffodil before I got up,
I asked myself the question,
“What do you want of your life?”
and I realized with a start of recognition and terror,
“Exactly what I have— but to be commensurate, to handle it all better.”

– May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Notes:

Word. Full Stop.

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wrinkle-face-close-up-portrait

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant
compared to the Gestalt of the whole person
I have become in this past year.
Somewhere in The Poet and the Donkey Andy
speaks for me when he says,
“Do not deprive me of my age. I have earned it.”

– May Sarton, Journal of a Solitude

Notes:

That one. The quiet healing road.

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face-portrait-duality

I am torn between two ways to handle this doldrum that has been going on for weeks, really since January, when I did at least get down a few small poems. The first way is to give in, to enjoy the light on flowers— yesterday white daffodils and white iris in the dusk— to enjoy this beautiful place, rejoice in the animal presences (Bramble at last comes up here to my study and curls up on the daybed…), to live the slow quiet rhythm of a day as a kind of healing. The other way is to ask a great deal more of myself, to drive myself, and hope to break through into deeper, more valid places.

~ May Sarton, Tuesday, March 9th. The House by the Sea: A Journal

Notes:

  • Image via Mennyfox55
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  • Inspired by Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” – […] I shall be telling this with a sigh / Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I – / I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.