So much of our lives depends on accidents of birth, time, and geography. This haunts me. In some lives, few "or"s are possible. The pain of that is behind the second stanza of this poem. Jane Hirshfield More Quotes by Jane Hirshfield More Quotes From Jane Hirshfield You may do this, I tell you, it is permitted. Begin again the story of your life. Jane Hirshfield begin-again stories may Zen pretty much comes down to three things -- everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention. Jane Hirshfield three pay attention "And" seems to me closest. "And" nods toward the real. And "and" is the path to perspective. To feel and see from more angles and know all of them true, even the incomprehensible ones, even the ones that contradict one another. Jane Hirshfield perspective real path How fragile we are, between the few good moments. Jane Hirshfield good-moments fragile moments Poems give us permission to be unsure, in ways we must be if we are ever to learn anything not already known. If you look with open eyes at your actual life, it's always going to be the kind of long division problem that doesn't work out perfectly evenly. Poems let you accept the multiplicity and complexity of the actual, they let us navigate the unnavigable, insoluble parts of our individual fates and shared existence. Jane Hirshfield fate eye long Art-making is learned by immersion. You take in vocabularies of thought and feeling, grammar, diction, gesture, from the poems of others, and emerge with the power to turn language into a lathe for re-shaping, re-knowing your own tongue, heart, and life. Jane Hirshfield vocabulary knowing art Existence itself is nothing if not an amazement. Good poems restore amazement. Jane Hirshfield amazement existence ifs Something looks back from the trees, Jane Hirshfield who-i-am tree looks A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow. Jane Hirshfield roots heart tree When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery. Jane Hirshfield goal writing moving You must try, the voice said, to become colder. I understood at once. It's like the bodies of gods: cast in bronze, braced in stone. Only something heartless could bear the full weight. Jane Hirshfield heartless voice trying Habit, laziness, and fear conspire to keep us comfortably within the familiar. Jane Hirshfield familiar habit laziness How silently the heart pivots on its hinge. Jane Hirshfield hinges heart In sorrow, pretend to be fearless. In happiness, tremble. Jane Hirshfield fearless sorrow Creativity itself is a joyous unlatching. The act of creative imagining, inventing, saying differently, crafting a metaphor or image, then crafting another metaphor or image when you go further or when you revise - all these take whatever you think "is" and make clear that other possibilities exist as well. The sense of possibility, the amplitude and freedom that sense of malleability brings - for me, that cannot help but be joyous. Jane Hirshfield creativity creative thinking The secret of understanding poetry is to hear poetry's words as what they are: the full self's most intimate speech, half waking, half dream. You listen to a poem as you might listen to someone you love who tells you their truest day. Their words might weep, joke, whirl, leap. What's unspoken in the words will still be heard. It's also the way we listen to music: You don't look for extractable meaning, but to be moved. Jane Hirshfield understanding self dream Passion does not make careful arguments: it declares itself, and that is enough. Jane Hirshfield argument passion doe Let the vow of this day keep itself wildly and wholly Spoken and silent, surprise you inside your ears Sleeping and waking, unfold itself inside your eyes Let its fierceness and tenderness hold you Let its vastness be undisguised in all your days. Jane Hirshfield vastness eye sleep The creative is always an act of recombination, with something added by new juxtaposition—as making a spark requires two things struck together. Jane Hirshfield creativity creative two Poetry's work is not simply the recording of inner or outer perception; it makes by words and music new possibilities of perceiving Jane Hirshfield words-and-music possibility perception
