Quotes About Meditation

The head can travel a far piece while the body sits in one spot. It can traverse many decades, and many conversations can be had, even with the dead.

When tears come, I breathe deeply and rest. I know I am swimming in a hallowed stream where many have gone before. I am not alone, crazy, or having a nervous breakdown . . . My heart is at work. My soul is awake.

The Old Poets Of China Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart.

The face of the moose is as sad as the face of Jesus.

But mostly I just stand in the dark field, in the middle of the world, breathing

Emerson, I am trying to live, as you said we must, the examined life. But there are days I wish there was less in my head to examine, not to speak of the busy heart. How would it be to be Percy, I wonder, not thinking, not weighing anything, just running forward.

It is no use thinking that writing of poems – the actual writing – can accommodate itself to a social setting, even the most sympathetic social setting of a workshop composed of friends. It cannot. The work improves there and often the will to work gets valuable nourishment and ideas. But, for good reasons, the poem requires of the writer not society or instruction, but a patch of profound and unbroken solitude.

I want to sit down on the sand and look around and get dreamy; I want to see what spirits are peeking out of the faces of the roses.

Why do I have so many thoughts, they are driving me crazy. Why am I always going anywhere, instead of somewhere?

God, rest in my heart and fortify me, take away my hunger for answers

Every morning I walk like this around the pond, thinking: if the doors to my heart ever close, I am as good as dead.

Only last week I went out among the thorns and said to the wild roses: deny me not, but suffer my devotion. Then, all afternoon, I sat among them.

Creative work needs solitude. It needs concentration, without interruptions. It needs the whole sky to fly in, and no eye watching until it comes to that certainty which it aspires to, but does not necessarily have at once. Privacy, then. A place apart—to pace, to chew pencils, to scribble and erase and scribble again.

Inside every mind, there's a hermit's cave full of light.

A poem on the page speaks to the listening mind.

Wherever I am, the world comes after me. It offers me its busyness. It does not believe that I do not want it. Now I understand why the old poets of China went so far and high into the mountains, then crept into the pale mist.

I have not written here out of imagination and invention, but out of meditation and memoy. No doubt my memory has the usual partiality of the individual, and is not entirely trustworthy. Still, I have been loyal here to the experiences of my own life and not, as is required in the more designed arts, to the needs of the line or the paragraph.

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside, looking into the shining world? Because, properly attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion. — Mary Oliver, from "What I Have Learned So Far," New and Selected Poems . (Beacon Press; Reprint, 2001 edition July 1, 1993)

Fifteen minutes of music with nothing playing.

He lives nowhere but on the page, and in the attentive mind that leans above that page.

I have my ways of praying, as you no doubt have yours. Besides, when I am alone I can become invisible. I can sit on the top of a dune as motionless as an uprise of weeds, until the foxes run by unconcerned. I can hear the almost unhearable sound of the roses singing. — Mary Oliver, from "How I Go to the Woods," Swan: Poems and Prose Poems (Beacon Press, 2010)

The one thing he is adamant about is that we should look - we must look - for that is the liquor of life, that brooding upon issues, that attention to thought even as we weed the garden or milk the cow.

How often now I just sit, with my elbows on the desk and my hands holding my face bold and upright, and stare into the past.