“Inside the pear there’s a paradise we will never know, our only hint the sweetness of its taste.” - Comice, Below Cold Mountain





If we have no aptitude or natural taste for geometry this does not mean that our faculty for attention will not be developed by wrestling with a problem or studying a theorem. On the contrary it is almost an advantage. ... Without our knowing or feeling it, this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul. ... Every time that a human being succeeds in making an effort of attention with the sole idea of increasing his grasp of truth, he acquires a greater aptitude for grasping it, even if his effort produces no visible fruit.


Simone Weil, “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” (1942)


https://www.themathesontrust.org/library/weil-reflections-on-the-right-use



"To write a poem you must first create a pen that will write what you want to say. For better or worse, this is the work of a lifetime."

- Jim Harrison




“"What can I but enumerate old themes."[6] yeats




“Our very life depends on everything’s

Recurring till we answer from within.

The thousandth time may prove the charm.”




― Robert Frost




If there is a real desire, if the thing desired is really light, the desire for light produces it. There is a real desire when there is an effort of attention. It is really light that is desired if all other incentives are absent. Even if our efforts of attention seem for years to be producing no result, one day a light that is in exact proportion to them will flood the soul. Every effort adds a little gold to a treasure no power on earth can take away. -Simone Weil

 https://www.demellospirituality.com/uncategorized/im-an-ass-youre-an-ass-were-all-asses/

https://www.wisdom2be.com/files/527084cb2ec1c48f296ad3fa01cec882-165.html

 

Burning the Old Year

Naomi Shihab Nye - 1952-

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Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.