On What You're Supposed to be Doing

Via Catherine: This is true happiness: to have no ambition and to work like a horse as if you had every ambition. To live far from (your people), not to need them and yet to love them. To have the stars above, the land to your left and the sea to your right and to realize of a sudden that in your heart, life has accomplished its final miracle. Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek Related (and also via Catherine 🥰): a most lovely poem by Mary Oliver called “The Summer Day” 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 pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face. Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away. I don’t know exactly what a prayer is. I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down…