Quotes from Anita Barrows

And suddenly you know: that was enough. You rise and there appears before you in all its longings and hesitations the shape of what you lived. Book of Images

We are told not to leave food on the table overnight: it draws the dead.

Often when I imagine you your wholeness cascades into many shapes. You run like a herd of luminous deer and I am dark, I am forest. You are a wheel at which I stand, whose dark spokes sometimes catch me up, revolve me nearer to the center.

Be forever dead in Eurydice, and climb back singing. Climb praising as you return to connection. Here among the disappearing, in the realm of the transient, be a ringing glass that shatters as it rings. Be. And know as well the need to not be: let that ground of all that changes bring you to completion now. To all that has run its course, and to the vast unsayable numbers of beings abounding in Nature, add yourself gladly, and cancel the cost. Sonnets to Orpheus II, 13

To love does not mean to surrender, dissolve, and merge with another person. It is the noble opportunity for an individual to ripen, to become something in and of himself. To become a world in response to another is a great immodest challenge that has sought him out and called him forth.

I want to ask you, as clearly as I can, to bear with patience all that is unresolved in your heart, and try to love the questions themselves, as if they were rooms yet to enter or books written in a foreign language. Don't dig for answers that can't be given you yet: you cannot live them now. For everything must be lived. Live the questions now, perhaps then, someday, you will gradually, without noticing, live into the answer. Worpswede, July 16, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

Springtimes have needed you. And there are stars expecting you to notice them.

Only what is within you is near; all else is far. And this within: so packed and pressured, barely contained, unsayable.

Already my gaze is upon the hill, the sunlit one. The way to it, barely begun, lies ahead. So we are grasped by what we have not grasped, full of promise, shining in the distance. It changes us, even if we do not reach it, into something we barely sense, but are; a movement beckons, answering our movement . . . But we just feel the wind against us.

When Things Close In It feels as though I make my own way through massive rock like a vein of ore alone, encased. I am so deep inside it I can't see the path or any distance: everything is close and everything closing in on me has turned to stone. Since I still don't know enough about pain, this terrible darkness makes me small, If it's you, though— press down hard on me, break in that I may know the weight of your hand and you, the fullness of my cry.

Winning does not tempt that man. His growth is this: to be defeated by ever greater forces. Book of Images

This is what the things can teach us: to fall, patiently to trust our heaviness. Even a bird has to do that before he can fly.

Go to the Limits of Your Longing God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night. These are the words we dimly hear: You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me. From The Book of Hours I, 59

And Everything Matters The tasks that have been entrusted to us are often difficult. Almost everything that matters is difficult, and everything matters. Worpswede, July 16, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

Through All That Happens As you unfold as an artist, just keep on, quietly and earnestly, growing through all that happens to you. You cannot disrupt this process more violently than by looking outside yourself for answers that may only be found by attending to your innermost feeling. Paris, February 17, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

To Darkness You, darkness, of whom I am born— I love you more than the flame that limits the world to the circle it illumines and excludes all the rest. But the dark embraces everything: shapes and shadows, creatures and me, people, nations—just as they are. From The Book of Hours I, 11

What Is Within You Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you…be it remembrance of your own childhood or longing for your own future. Only be attentive to what is arising in you, and prize it above all that you perceive around you. What happens most deeply inside you is worthy of your whole love. Work with that and don't waste too much time and courage explaining it to other people. Rome, December 23, 1903 Letters to a Young Poet

What should I say about your tendency to doubt your struggle or to harmonize your inner and outer life? My wish is ever strong that you find enough patience within you and enough simplicity to have faith. May you gain more and more trust in what is challenging, and confidence in the solitude you bear. Let life happen to you. Believe me: life is in the right in any case. Furnborg, Jonsered, Sweden, November 4, 1904 Letters to a Young Poet

Love Song How shall I hold my soul to not intrude upon yours? How shall I lift it beyond you to other things? I would gladly lodge it with lost objects in the dark, in some far still place that does not tremble when you tremble. But all that touches us, you and me, plays us together, like the bow of a violin that from two strings draws forth one voice. On what instrument are we strung? What musician is playing us? Oh sweet song.

Never Yet Spoken I believe in all that has never yet been spoken. I want to free what waits within me so that what no one has dared to wish for may for once spring clear without my contriving. From The Book of Hours I, 12

It's here in all the pieces of my shame that now I find myself again. From The Book of Hours II, 2

In the course of my work this last long winter, I have experienced a truth more completely than ever before: that life's bestowal of riches already surpasses any subsequent impoverishment. What, then, remains to be feared? Only that we might forget this! But around and within us, how much it helps to remember!

Between yourself & the beloved, between yourself & your joy, the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft of sunlight on the rock, the song. Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume whatever solidness this is you call your life, & send you out, a tremor of heat, a radiance, a changed flickering thing?