Sometimes one has simply to endure a period of depression for what it may hold of illumination if one can live through it, attentive to what it exposes or demands.

I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing a lot.

The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break your poem to remake it.

In the garden the door is always open into the "holy" - growth, birth, death. Every flower holds the whole mystery in its short cycle, and in the garden we are never far away from death, the fertilizing, good, creative death.

Wrinkles here and there seem unimportant compared to the Gestalt of the whole person I have become in this past year.

So let the world go, but hold fast to joy.

Solitude is one thing and loneliness is another.