Quotes from Jane Hirshfield

The Promise" Stay, I said to the cut flowers. They bowed their heads lower. Stay, I said to the spider, who fled. Stay, leaf. It reddened, embarrassed for me and itself. Stay, I said to my body. It sat as a dog does, obedient for a moment, soon starting to tremble. Stay, to the earth of riverine valley meadows, of fossiled escarpments, of limestone and sandstone. It looked back with a changing expression, in silence. Stay, I said to my loves. Each answered, Always.

Hope is the hardest love we carry.

if you see for yourself, hear for yourself, and enter deeply enough this seeing and hearing, all things will speak with and through you.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Let reason flow like water around a stone, the stone remains.

China Whales follow the whale-roads. Geese, roads of magnetized air. To go great distance, exactitudes matter. Yet how often the heart that set out for Peru arrives in China, Steering hard. consulting the charts the whole journey.

Wrong solitude vinegars the soul, right solitude oils it.

There is a door. It opens. Then it is closed. But a slip of light stays, like a scrap of unreadable paper left on the floor, or the one red leaf the snow releases in March.

In a room with many windows some thoughts slide past uncatchable, ghostly.

As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty, we become our choices.

The desire of monks and mystics is not unlike that of artists: to perceive the extraordinary within the ordinary by changing not the world but the eyes that look… To form the intention of new awareness is already to transform and be transformed.

To Hear the Falling World Only if I move my arm a certain way, it comes back. Or the way the light bends in the trees this time of year, so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart. I carry this in my body, seed in an unswept corner, husk-encowled and seeming safe. But they guard me, these small pains, from growing sure of myself and perhaps forgetting.

The nourishment of Cezanne's awkward apples is in the tenderness and alertness they awaken inside us.

There are worlds / in which nothing is adjective, everything noun.

Perimeter is not meaning, but it changes meaning,/as wit increases distance, and compassion erodes it.

Wherever the gaze rests, art will draw it also elsewhere, will remind that there is always more. Alice does not stop and face her own reflection in the looking-glass: she travels through it.

Jasmine "Almost the twenty-first century" -- how quickly the thought will grow dated, even quaint. Our hopes, our future, will pass like the hopes and futures of others. And all our anxieties and terrors, nights of sleeplessness, griefs, will appear then as they truly are -- Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine.

The work of existence devours its own unfolding. What dissolves will dissolve-- you, reader, and I, and all our quick angers and longings.

Hunger that comes and goes turns time into memory.

Optimism More and more I have come to admire resilience. Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side, it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true. But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers, mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

Bash? wrote, "The moon and sun are travelers of a hundred generations. The years, coming and going, are wanderers too. Spending a lifetime adrift on boat decks, greeting old age while holding a horse by the mouth—for such a person, each day is a journey, and the journey itself becomes home.

To feel sabi is to feel keenly one's own sharp and particular existence amid its own impermanence, and to value the singular moment as William Blake did "infinity in the palm of your hand"—to feel it precise and almost-weightless as a sand grain, yet also vast.

Desire is the moment before the race is run.

In one recorded dialogue with a student, Bash? instructed, "The problem with most poems is that they are either subjective or objective." "Don't you mean too subjective or too objective?" his student asked. Bash? answered, simply, "No.