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The End and the Beginning

By Wisława Szymborska

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop

Wisława Szymborska, poet and recipient of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature:

"Any knowledge that doesn't lead to new questions quickly dies out: it fails to maintain the temperature required for sustaining life."

James Clear • Newsletter Atomic Habits

I rose this morning early as usual, and went to my desk. But it’s spring, and the thrush is in the woods, somewhere in the twirled branches, and he is singing… I am touching a few leaves. I am noticing the way the yellow butterflies move together, in a twinkling cloud, over the field. And I am thinking: maybe just looking and listening... See more

No one can love you enough. Build a shelter for the flies and the wasps instead. Make houses for the rats and the owls and the bluebirds. Sit for hours in the shade and watch how these tiny citizens move, floating or drifting or scrabbling over stones, swooping or creeping in rings of shadow, rings of light. Make space inside your liquid heart for

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1996

Wislawa Szymborska nobelprize.org

The morning before he died in the final year of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these lines:

You can’t tell when strange things with meaning

will happen. I’m [still] here writing it down

just the way it was. “You don’t have to

prove anything,” my mother said. “Just be ready

for what God sends.” I listened and put my hand

out in the sun again.

Maria Popova • Yes: William Stafford’s Poetic Calibration of Perspective

Patricia • Article

Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean-- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down -- who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes. Now she lifts her pal

💭 This poem by Mary Oliver

“The Gardener”

Have I lived enough?

Have I loved enough?

Have I considered Right Action enough, have I

come to any conclusions?

Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude?

Have I endured loneliness with grace?

I say this, or perhaps I’m just thinking it.

Actually, I probably think too much.

Then I step out into the gar... See more