Life.

Tomura, South Wind, undated

Poetry is the flowering of ordinary possibilities …

This is its innocence and dignity.

Let us not be like those who wish to make the tree bear fruit first and the flower afterward – a conjuring trick and an advertisement.

Let us obey life, and the Spirit of Life that calls us to be poets, and we shall harvest many new fruits for which the world hungers – fruits of hope that have never been seen before.

When the poet puts his foot in that ever-moving river, poetry itself is born out of the flashing water …

No one can enter wearing the garments of public and collective ideas. He must feel the water on his skin.  He must know that immediacy is for naked minds only, and for the innocent.

Come, dervishes: here is the water of life.  Dance in it.

Thomas Merton