Deep dreams
Gratitude takes nerve.
I’m stepping back this time and letting a few other voices carry the weight. These lines say it better than I could right now.
Instead of adding to the noise, I’m sharing poems and passages about endurance and gratitude.
“On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea…
“…Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world.”
— Czesław Miłosz, A Song on the End of the World (Warsaw, 1944)
"If a man had no more to do with God than to be thankful, that would suffice.”
— Meister Eckhart, from Sermon 27 in Selected Writings.
“My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.”
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo (§10)
“We must accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world.
To make injustice the only measure of our attention
is to praise the Devil.”
— Jack Gilbert, A Brief for the Defense
“Listen
with the night falling we are saying thank you
we are stopping on the bridges to bow from the railings
we are running out of the glass rooms
with our mouths full of food to look at the sky
and say thank you
we are standing by the water thanking it
standing by the windows looking out
in our directions
back from a series of hospitals back from a mugging
after funerals we are saying thank you
after the news of the dead
whether or not we knew them we are saying thank you
over telephones we are saying thank you
in doorways and in the backs of cars and in elevators
remembering wars and the police at the door
and the beatings on stairs we are saying thank you
in the banks we are saying thank you
in the faces of the officials and the rich
and of all who will never change
we go on saying thank you thank you
with the animals dying around us
taking our feelings we are saying thank you
with the forests falling faster than the minutes
of our lives we are saying thank you
with the words going out like cells of a brain
with the cities growing over us
we are saying thank you faster and faster
with nobody listening we are saying thank you
thank you we are saying and waving
dark though it is ”
— W. S. Merwin, Thanks
"All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle."
— Attributed to St. Francis of Assisi. See also The Canticle of the Creatures.
Train Dreams — now streaming. (Too good for the Oscars, March 15th?)
A film balanced between darkness and light, it follows a stoic logger whose life of quiet grace—shaped by love, loss, beauty, and violence against immigrants in early twentieth-century America—unfolds without fanfare, yet with profound consequence.
Words that could have been spoken by Robert, the protagonist, from the last page of an old classic by George MacDonald, Lilith (1895).
“At times I seem to hear whisperings around me, as if some that loved me were talking of me; but when I would distinguish the words, they cease, and all is very still. I know not whether these things rise in my brain, or enter it from without. I do not seek them; they come, and I let them go.
“I wait; asleep or awake, I wait. Novalis says, ‘Our life is no dream, but it should and will perhaps become one.’”
Watch the trailer of Train Dreams, or read more about the film here.
“Rejoice, rejoice, we have no choice
But to carry on”
CSNY
Thank you so much for all these lines of poetry. I especially love Miłosz’s poem whose lines you’ve shared—such a powerful poem and beautiful Polish poet!