we are wounded in all the right places - kd lang

Song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rrv-sbQj-IQ

life will break you - Louis Erdrich, The Painted Drum

Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. 

You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. 

And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. 

Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.

ye are many by Percy Shelley

'Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number -
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are many - they are few.'
Percy Shelley

The Mask of Anarchism

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
...I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
of quiet birds circled in flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry;
I am not there. I did not die.

Anonymous

the well of grief - david whyte

Those who will not slip beneath
the still surface on the well of grief,
turning downwards through its black waters
to a place we can not breathe...
They will not find the source from which we drink.
The secret water; clean and clear.
Nor will they find in its darkness, glimmering,
the small round coins
thrown by those who wished for something else.

Song of myself (extract) Walt Whitman (1855)

I have heard what the talkers were talking,
The talk of the beginning
and the end.
But I do not talk of the beginning
or the end.
There was never anymore beginning
than there are now,
Nor any more youth or age
than there is now,
And never be any more perfection
than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell
than there is now.
Clear and sweet is my soul,
And clear and sweet is all that is not my soul.
I welcome every organ and attribute of me
Not an inch,
Not a particle of an inch is vile to me.
I am satisfied –
I see, I dance, I laugh, I sing!
I will go to the bank of the river in the woods
And become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it all to embrace me.
I am obsessed with the agony and ecstasy of this life!
It all amazes me!

The honeycomb - Pauline Stainer

They had made love early in the high bed,
not knowing the honeycomb stretched
between lathe and plaster of the outer wall.

For a century
the bees had wintered there,
prisoning sugar in the virgin wax.

At times of transition,
spring and autumn,
their vibration swelled the room.

Laying his hand against the plaster
in the May sunrise,
he felt faint frequency of their arousal,

Nor winters later, burning the beeswax candle,
could he forget his tremulous first loving
into the humming dawn.

Pauline Stainer