And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

I think one thing is that prayer has become more useful, interesting, fruitful, and... almost involuntary in my life.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems - the actual writing - can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

A dog can never tell you what she knows from the smells of the world, but you know, watching her, that you know almost nothing.

What can we do but keep on breathing in and out, modest and willing, and in our places?

Drive down any road, take a train or an airplane across the world, leave your old life behind, die and be born again~ wherever you arrive they'll be there first, glossy and rowdy and indistinguishable. The deep muscle of the world.

I know I can walk through the world, along the shore or under the trees, with my mind filled with things of little importance, in full self-attendance. A condition I can't really call being alive.