Tag: patience

It’s been a long day

Live & Learn22 Comments

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:

Summertime

Live & Learn12 Comments

rest-bed-feet

To my great regret, I no longer know how to be lazy, and summer is no fun without sloth. Indolence requires patience—to lie in the sun, for instance, day after day—and I have none left. When I could, it was bliss. I lived like the old Greeks, who knew nothing of hours, minutes, and seconds. No wonder they did so much thinking back then.

~ Charles Simic: ‘Summertime’, The New York Review of Books

Notes: Quotes – Thank you Beth @ Alive on all Channels. Photo – Your Eyes Blaze Out

I fought the wolves of patience

Live & Learn8 Comments

wolf-running-gif

[…]

I fought the wolves of patience
just to let it lie down.

See these waters they’ll pull you up,
Oh if you’re bolder than the darkness.
My my, let these songs be an instrument to cut,
Oh spaces ‘tween the happiness and the hardness […]

What we found
Down these roads that wander as lost as the heart,
Is a chance to breathe again, a chance for a fresh start…

~ Ben Howard, These Waters

Sources:

The Answer. Right Here.

Live & Learn22 Comments

“At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that — the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to try and to try and to try until it comes right. He must train himself in ruthless intolerance. That is, to throw away anything that is false no matter how much he might love that page or that paragraph. The most important thing is insight, that is … curiosity to wonder, to mull, and to muse why it is that man does what he does. And if you have that, then I don’t think the talent makes much difference, whether you’ve got that or not.”

~ William Faulkner, Press conference, University of Virginia, May 20, 1957

No stopping it now

Live & Learn31 Comments

black and white

I once read of a climber who, while clinging to the face of a climb thousands of feet above an alpine valley, said he could feel the earth turn under his hands. And I have read that a person with patience could move an aircraft carrier tied at a dock by leaning long enough against its side to get it started, knowing that once it began to move there’d be no bringing it back, and it came to me that the earth behaves like that, steadily moving out into time under the common pressure of billions of hands.

No stopping it now.

~ Ted Kooser, December. The Wheeling Year: A Poet’s Field Book

Credits: Photograph – boulderporn