Show them how to cry
when pets and people die.
Show them the infinite pleasure
in the touch of a hand.
And make the ordinary come alive for them.
The extraordinary will take care of itself.
By William Martin, The Parent’s Tao Te Ching: Ancient Advice for Modern Parents
Michael Coleman
there, their houses strongly placed
upon the valley sides, fields and gardens
rich in the windows. The river will run
clear, as we will never know it,
and over it, birdsong like a canopy.
On the levels of the hills will be
green meadows, stock bells in noon shade.
On the steeps where greed and ignorance cut down
the old forest, an old forest will stand,
its rich leaf-fall drifting on its roots.
The veins of forgotten springs will have opened.
Families will be singing in the fields.
In their voices they will hear a music
risen out of the ground. They will take
nothing from the ground they will not return,
whatever the grief at parting. Memory,
native to this valley, will spread over it
like a grove, and memory will grow
into legend, legend into song, song
into sacrament. The abundance of this place,
Do not ask your children
to strive for extraordinary lives.
Such striving may seem admirable,
but it is a way of foolishness.
Help them instead to find the wonder
and the marvel of an ordinary life.
Show them the joy of tasting
tomatoes, apples, and pears.
It is said that before entering the sea a river trembles with fear.
She looks back at the path she has traveled, from the peaks of the mountains,
the long winding road crossing forests and villages.
If we will have the wisdom to survive,
to stand like slow-growing trees
on a ruined place, renewing, enriching it,
if we will make our seasons welcome here,
asking not too much of earth or heaven,
then a long time after we are dead
the lives our lives prepare will live
And in front of her, she sees an ocean so vast, that to enter
there seems nothing more than to disappear forever.
But there is no other way.
The river can not go back.
the songs of its people and its birds,
will be health and wisdom and indwelling
light. This is no paradisal dream.
Its hardship is its possibility.
~Wendell Berry
#poetry
Nobody can go back.
To go back is impossible in existence.
The river needs to take the risk of entering the ocean
because only then will fear disappear, because that's where the river will know it's not about disappearing into the ocean, but of becoming the ocean.
~ Khalil Gibran
#poetry
