inter alia

[harlenem]

My house is the red earth; it could be the center of the world. I’ve heard New York, Paris, or Tokyo called the center of the world, but I say it is magnificently humble. You could drive by and miss it. Radio waves can obscure it. Words cannot construct it, for there are some sounds left to sacred wordless form. For instance, that fool crow, picking through trash near the corral, understands the center of the world as greasy scraps of fat. Just ask him. He doesn’t have to say that the earth has turned scarlet through fierce belief, after centuries of heartbreak and laughter—he perches on the blue bowl of the sky, and laughs

“My House Is the Red Earth” | Joy Harjo

[harlenem]

An in-habit is part of someone who loves a particular place so very much that regardless of where they go they always leave their in-habit behind. If I should ever have to leave Stay More, perish the thought of that unlikelihood, my in-habit will fiercely take possession of this whole damn town.

Donald Harington | WITH

[harlenem]

To stay at home is paradoxically to change, to move. When poets—and people of any other calling—stay at home the first thing they move away from is professionalism. They move away from ‘professional standards.’ Their work begins to develop under pressure of questions not primarily literary: What good is it? Is it at home here? What do the neighbors think of it? Do they read it, any of them? What have they contributed to it? What does it owe them?

Wendell Berry | Standing by Words

[harlenem]

But of course nothing human exists without a human purpose somewhere back of it and a human effect somewhere ahead of it. If things are made for no good purpose, are made to serve no good purpose, then they corrupt their causes, and they have bad effects. ‘Autonomous’ poems, I think, do make something happen, and are so intended: they accredit their makers as ‘poets’—the worst possible reason for poetry to exist. They thus corrupt the ‘poet’ by allowing him or her to fulfill too easily a dangerous ambition. And they corrupt poetry, language, and the art of reading by offering the reader words that avoid any purpose or reference—and, sooner or later, also any poetic tradition—by which their truth or excellence can be measured. We wind up with a product not made in any line of descent of the art of poetry, but one made in helpless imitation of the ‘consumer products’ of a ‘cheap energy’ industrial economy. We wind up with poems which, in value and justification, do not differ greatly from chewing gum.

Wendell Berry | Standing by Words

[harlenem]

To lie, habitually, as a way of life, is to lose contact with the unconscious. It is like taking sleeping pills, which confer sleep but blot out dreaming. The unconscious wants truth. It ceases to speak to those who want something else more than truth.

Adrienne Rich | "Women and Honor"

[harlenem]

Don't imagine that we're doing ecological politics to save the world. We're doing ecological politics to save ourselves, to save our souls. It's a personal exercise in character and manners. It's a matter of etiquette. It's a matter of living right. It's not that the planet requires us to be good to it. It's that we must do it because it's an aesthetic and ethical choice.

Gary Snyder | Nobody Home (2014)

[harlenem]

Hey there you

[harlenem]

Every name is a step toward the consummate Name, as everything broken points to the unbroken.

Martin Buber

[harlenem]

You, on the outside, perhaps better than those always inhabiting the field, know that it doesn't matter whether you are inside or outside the faith-field, because there is no inside or outside anyway under an undiscriminating sky. The atheist is no less an inquirer than a believer. In living at all, she is no less a believer than an unbeliever.

Fanny Howe | The Wedding Dress

[harlenem]

Once upon a time | Aquarena Springs, San Marcos, TX

[harlenem]

Fifty-four years lighting up the sky. A quivering leap smashes a billion worlds. Hah! Entire body looks for nothing. Living, I plunge into Yellow Springs.

Dōgen, written just before his death in 1253