True love will find you in the end

(Hiking at the waterfall in Palmetto)

 

(The first Bradford Pear blooms of the season)

 

(This bird was singing to me today, all morning long)

 

(Farmhouse at the Serenbe Inn)

 

(A horse/donkey mixed breed of sorts. He licked grass and dandelions from the palm of my hand.)

 

There's this larger feeling of lack today, of need, for comfort. I've had a lot of time to think lately -- to feel my presence in this world, and the texture of the life that's been buildng around me. Dating isn't a good thing for me right now. It's not the time for it, I know. I long for evenings alone at home, baking, cooking, cleaning, reading, thinking, dreaming. But I have learned from the experience, one very important thing about what I do need in a person: imagination. He must, absolutely must, have a sense of imagination, a mind for creativity -- he must have the courage, and the desire, to dream.

(Stone labyrinth in the middle of the woods. It was remarkably peaceful.)

 

As always, I brought back a handful of forest treasures. A gorgeous, intricate sponge of sage moss, the bone of what was once a very large bird, the womb of a tree seed, granite, and a broken piece of porceline.

 

Jane Hirshfield. If you haven't read her yet, you must. She is incredible, absolutely icredible. I can't get enough of her. In fact, I will let you in on a little known quirk of mine: when reading a book of poetry, I tend to start at the back and work my way to the front. I do this, I think, in order to trick myself into believing the book will never end.

Here is a favorite Hirshfield poem of recent:

Against Certainty

There is something out in the dark that wants to correct us.
Each time I think "this," it answers "that."
Answers hard, in the heart-grammar's strictness.

If I then say "that," it too is taken away.

Between the certainty and the real, an ancient enmity.
When the cat waits in the path-hedge,
no cell of her body is not waiting.
This is how she is able so completely to disappear.

I would like to enter this silence portion as she does.

To live amid the great vanishing as a cat must live,
one shadow fully at ease inside the other.