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When a current bout of sickness despatched me sulking with indignant disappointment on the damage of lengthy laid plans, I needed to remind myself that we had been by no means promised any of this; that it’s hubris and self-importance and virtually touching delusion to anticipate an detached cosmos to bend to our will, our needs, and our plans; that assembly the universe by itself phrases is the tip of struggling.
Via the haze of what Virginia Woolf referred to as the “wastes and deserts of the soul” uncovered by being sick, I remembered a stunning calibration of perspective by the poet and peace activist William Stafford (January 17, 1914–August 28, 1993), discovered within the posthumous assortment The Manner It Is: New and Chosen Poems (public library).
YESby William Stafford
It may occur any time, twister,earthquake, Armageddon. It may occur.Or sunshine, love, salvation.
It may, you already know. That’s why we wakeand look out — no guaranteesin this life.
However some bonuses, like morning,like proper now, like midday,like night.
Stafford had a late begin as a poet — his first main assortment was printed when he was 48. After which the poems that had been writing themselves in him all his life got here pouring out, spare and beautiful. Inside eight years, he was elected Poet Laureate of the United Staes.
The morning earlier than he died within the closing 12 months of his seventies, he drafted a poem containing these strains:
You may’t inform when unusual issues with meaningwill occur. I’m [still] right here writing it downjust the best way it was. “You don’t have toprove something,” my mom stated. “Simply be readyfor what God sends.” I listened and put my handout within the solar once more. It was all simple.
Complement with Viktor Frankl, writing shortly after his launch from the focus camps, on saying “sure” to life in any case and Henry James on the right way to cease ready and begin residing, then revisit Barbara Ras’s kindred poem “You Can’t Have It All” and Hannah Emerson’s cosmic howl of sure sure sure.
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