We saw the strong trees struggle and their plumes do down, The poplar bend and whip back till it split to fall, The elm tear up at the root and topple like a crown, The pine crack at the base - we had to watch them all. The ash, the lovely cedar. We had to watch them fall. They went so softly under the loud flails of air, Before that fury they went down like feathers, With all the hundred springs that flowered in their hair, and all the years, endured in all the weathers - To fall as if they were nothing, as if they were feathers.

Revision is not going back and fussing around, but going forward into the process of creation

making order out of disorder any time, anywhere, can be regarded as a sacrament.

Public education was not founded to give society what it wants. Quite the opposite.

Without anxiety life would have very little savor.

Gardening is one of the rewards of middle age, when one is ready for an impersonal passion, a passion that demands patience, acute awareness of a world outside oneself, and the power to keep on growing through all the times of drought, through the cold snows, towards those moments of pure joy when all failures are forgotten and the plum tree flowers.

There are some griefs so loud/They could bring down the sky/And there are griefs so still/None knows how deep they lie.