Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.
Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.
- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,
You shall possess the good of the earth and sun, (there are millions of suns left,)
You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look
through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.
- Walt Whitman, Song of Myself #2
We join spokes together in a wheel,
but it is the center hole
that makes the wagon move.
We shape clay into a pot,
but it is the emptiness inside
that holds whatever we want.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
- Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching
You have to let things
Occupy their own space.
This room is small,
But the green settee
Likes to be here.
The big marsh reeds,
Crowding out the slough,
Find the world good.
You have to let things
Be as they are.
Who knows which of us
Deserves the world more?
- Robert Bly
I worked for a menial’s hire,
Only to learn, dismayed,
That any wage I had asked of Life,
Life would have paid.
- Jessie B Rittenhouse
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
- Theodore Roethke
![Ishy ; (This is wusupp'] [: by ishthefish](http://25.media.tumblr.com/avatar_bd7b757a66b6_24.png "Ishy ; (This is wusupp'] [: by ishthefish"){kind=avatar}
