I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied

Credit: South Australian History Network

I am a parcel of vain strivings tied

By a chance bond together,

Dangling this way and that, their links

Were made so loose and wide,

Methinks,

For milder weather.

A bunch of violets without their roots,

And sorrel intermixed,

Encircled by a wisp of straw

Once coiled about their shoots,

The law

By which I'm fixed.

A nosegay which Time clutched from out

Those fair Elysian fields,

With weeds and broken stems, in haste,

Doth make the rabble rout

That waste

The day he yields.

And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,

Drinking my juices up,

With no root in the land

To keep my branches green,

But stand

In a bare cup.

Some tender buds were left upon my stem

In mimicry of life,

But ah! the children will not know,

Till time has withered them,

The woe

With which they're rife.

But now I see I was not plucked for naught,

And after in life's vase

Of glass set while I might survive,

But by a kind hand brought

Alive

To a strange place.

That stock thus thinned will soon redeem its hours,

And by another year,

Such as God knows, with freer air,

More fruits and fairer flowers

Will bear,

While I droop here.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Advancing towards dreams

Source: Favim

I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.

~ Henry David Thoreau

Religiousness

Source: Favim

You once asked if I’m religious. And I’m not, in the traditional go-to-church kind of way. 

But in Walden, Thoreau said that ‘A field of water betrays the spirit that is in the air. It is continually receiving new life and motion from above. It is intermediate between land and sky.’ 

If there truly is some type of life force, I believe I’m closer to it in a place like this one.

~ Susan C. Daffron

Aloneness

Source: Favim

Loneliness and aloneness

they are not the same

for the shell of the mind

hears echoes of many seas

it hears the calling of gulls

from this savage sky

and an ebbing tide

lapping the small white stones.

~ Ian Emberson

_________________________________

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. 

~ Henry David Thoreau

Aloneness

Source: Favim

Loneliness and aloneness

they are not the same

for the shell of the mind

hears echoes of many seas

it hears the calling of gulls

from this savage sky

and an ebbing tide

lapping the small white stones.

~ Ian Emberson

_________________________________

I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. 

~ Henry David Thoreau

Imagining Defeat

She woke me up at dawn,

her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.

I sat up and looked out the window

at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.

A bus ticket in her hand.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,

a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.

I reached under the bed for my menthols

and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead

in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,

so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

Though to believe any of that, I thought,

you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

~ David Berman

_______________________________________

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive. 

~ Henry David Thoreau

Imagining Defeat

She woke me up at dawn,

her suitcase like a little brown dog at her heels.

I sat up and looked out the window

at the snow falling in the stand of blackjack trees.

A bus ticket in her hand.

Then she brought something black up to her mouth,

a plum I thought, but it was an asthma inhaler.

I reached under the bed for my menthols

and she asked if I ever thought of cancer.

Yes, I said, but always as a tree way up ahead

in the distance where it doesn't matter

And I suppose a dead soul must look back at that tree,

so far behind his wagon where it also doesn't matter.

except as a memory of rest or water.

Though to believe any of that, I thought,

you have to accept the premise

that she woke me up at all.

~ David Berman

_______________________________________

It is usually the imagination that is wounded first, rather than the heart; it being much more sensitive. 

~ Henry David Thoreau