love is a direction

   

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It is only necessary to know that love is a direction not a state of the soul. 

If one is unaware of this, one falls into despair at the first onslaught of affliction.

—Simone Weil

The Love of God and Affliction, Waiting for God

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In a dark time, the eye begins to see,

I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;

I hear my echo in the echoing wood -

A lord of nature weeping to a tree.

I live between the heron and the wren,

Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul

At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!

I know the purity of pure despair,

My shadow pinned against a sweating wall.

That place among the rocks - is it a cave,

Or winding path? The edge is what I have. 

—Theodore Roethke

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all those things for which we have no words are lost. —Annie Dillard

 

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Before this longing,
I lived serene as a fish
At one with the plants in the pond,
The mare's tail, the floating frogbite,
Among my eight-legged friends,
Open like a pool, a lesser parsnip,
Like a leech, looping myself along,
A bug-eyed edible one,
A mouth like a stickleback,-
A thing quiescent!

But now-
The wild stream, the sea itself cannot contain me:
I dive with the black hag, the cormorant,
Or walk the pebbly shore with the humpbacked heron,
Shaking out my catch in the morning sunlight,
Or rise with the gar-eagle, the great-winged condor,
Floating over the mountains,
Pitting my breast against the rushing air,
A phoenix, sure of my body,
Perpetually rising out of myself,
My wings hovering over the shorebirds,
Or beating against the black clouds of the storm,
Protecting the sea-cliffs.


—Theodore Roethke
her longing 

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