In a dark time, the eye begins to see
Theodore Roethke

I love the dark hours of my being.
My mind deepens into them.
There I can find, as in old letters,
The days of my life, already lived,
And held like a legend, andthen understood.
Then the knowing comes: I can open
To another life that's wide and timeless.

by Rainer Maria Rilke

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When it seems that our sorrow is too great to be borne, let us think of the great family
of the heavy-hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitable, we will feel about us, their arms and their understanding.
Helen Keller

Trying To Pray
This time, I have left my body behind me, crying
In its dark thorns.
Still,
There are good things in this world.
It is dusk.
It is the good darkness
Of women's hands that touch loaves.
The spirit of a tree begins to move.
I touch leaves. I close my eyes and think of water.
-James Wright

What is life?
It is the flash of the firefly in the night. It is the breath of the buffalo in the winter time. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset. ( Last words of Crowfoot of the Blackfoot tribe.)

The Journey
Above the mountains the geese turn into the light again
painting their black silhouettes on an open sky.
Sometimes everything has to be enscribed across the heavens
so you can find the one line already written inside you.
Sometimes it takes a great sky
to find that small, bright and indescribable wedge of freedom
in your own heart.
Sometimes with the bones of the black sticks left when the fire has gone out
someone has written something new in the ashes of your life ..
You are not leaving,
------you are arriving.

David Whyte, The House of Belonging

Joyful Winter, in honor of my Teddy who passed this year, like a golden sun, I hold him in my heart, no longer hands, Kat