Ever-Ness

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”― George Eliot

“Sometimes the desire to be lost again, as long ago, comes over me like a vapor.
With growth into adulthood, responsibilities claimed me, so many heavy coats.
I didn’t choose them, I don’t fault them, but it took time to reject them.
Now in the spring I kneel, I put my face into the packets of violets, the dampness, the freshness, the sense of ever-ness.
Something is wrong, I know it, if I don’t keep my attention on eternity.
May I be the tiniest nail in the house of the universe, tiny but useful.
May I stay forever in the stream.
May I look down upon the windflower and the bull thistle and the coreopsis with the greatest respect.”– Mary Oliver, Upstream: Selected Essays

Upstream where the river is but a trickle
Fertile soil readied for planting
Beauty ever present
What will I plant, nurture, feed today?
Paying rapt attention to what is mine to hold
Tiny but useful
In the flow of life everchanging
Longing, wishing, waiting, abiding, tending, pursuing
Planting trees we’ll never see
Sense of ever-ness overflowing

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion–a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”― George Eliot, Middlemarch