Mornings at Blackwater" For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

So every day So every day I was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Sometimes I need only to stand wherever I am to be blessed.

Far off in the red mangroves an alligator has heaved himself onto a hummock of grass and lies there, studying his poems.

Look, hasn't my body already felt like the body of a flower?

The world is: fun, and familiar, and healthful, and unbelievably refreshing, and lovely. And it is the theater of the spiritual; it is the multiform utterly obedient to a mystery.