Life comes in clusters, clusters of solitude, then a cluster when there is hardly time to breathe.

Everything that slows us down and forces patience, everything that sets us back into the slow circles of nature, is a help. Gardening is an instrument of grace.

It is the place of renewal and of safety, where for a little while there will be no harm or attack and, while every sense is nourished, the soul rests.

I simply adore being alone - I find it a consuming thirst - and when that thirst is slaked, then I am happy.

It is only when we can believe that we are creating the soul that life has any meaning, but when we can believe it - and I do and always have - then there is nothing we do that is without meaning and nothing that we suffer that does not hold the seed of creation in it.

For inside all the weakness of old age, the spirit, God knows, is as mercurial as it ever was.

poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.