Status Updates From House of Light

Incredible. Oliver’s ability to find the sublime in nature is good for the soul.

Favorites:
- Some Questions You Might Ask
- The Deer
- The Summer Day

Favorite line:
“As though the only thing that mattered was to praise the world sufficiently-“

If I had another life
I would want to spend it all on some
unstinting happiness.

I would be a fox, or a tree
full of waving branches.
I wouldn't mind being a rose
in a field full of roses.

Fear has not yet occurred to them, nor ambition.
Reason they have not yet thought of.
Neither do they ask how long they must be roses, and then what.
Or any other foolish question.

what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled--
to cast aside the weight of facts
and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking
into the white fire of a mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing--
that the light is everything--that it is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.

For hours I had tried to sleep
and failed;
restless and wild,

I could settle on nothing
and fell, in envy
of the things of darkness
following their sleepy course--

the lilies
are slippery and wild--they are
devoid of meaning, they are
simply doing,
from the deepest
spurs of their being,
what they are impelled to do
every summer.
And so, dear sorrow, are you.

Is there anything more important
than hunger and happiness? Each bee entered
the frills of a flower to find
the sticky fountain, and if some dust
spilled on the walkways of the petals
and caught onto their bodies, I don't know
if the bees know that otherwise death
is everywhere, even in the red swamp
of a flower. But they did this
with no small amount of desperation--you might say: love.

Each of us is given
only so many mornings to do it--
to look around and love
the oily fur of our lives,
the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.
Days I don't do this
I feel the terror of idleness,
like a red thirst.
Death isn't just an idea.
When we die, the body breaks open
like a river;
the old body goes on, climbing the hill.