The Starry Night
Vincent van Gogh
(Dutch, 1853-1890)
Saint Rémy, June 1889. Oil on canvas, 29 x 36 1/4″
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“This morning I saw the country from my window a long time before sunrise,”
the artist wrote to his brother Theo,
“with nothing but the morning star, which looked very big.”
Rooted in imagination and memory,
The Starry Night embodies an inner, subjective expression
of van Gogh’s response to nature.
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A billion stars go spinning through the night,
Blazing high above your head.
But in you is the presence that
Will be, when all the stars are dead.
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Ranier Maria Rilke
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The Journey
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One day you finally knew what you had to do,
and began,
though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice,
though the whole house began to tremble
and you felt the old tug at your ankles.
“Mend my life!” each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers at the very foundations,
though their melancholy was terrible.
It was already late enough,
and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly recognized as your own,
that kept you company as you strode deeper
and deeper into the world,
determined to do the only thing you could do,
determined to save the only life you could save.
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Mary Oliver
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Poem
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Willing to die,
You give up
your will. Keep still
until, moved
by what moves
all else, you move.
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Wendell Berry
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In Blackwater Wood
Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars
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of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,
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the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders
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of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is
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nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned
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in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side
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is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world
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you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
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against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
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Mary Oliver
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“The thought manifests as the word;
The word manifests as the deed;
The deed develops into habit;
And habit hardens into character;
So watch the thought and its ways with care,
And let it spring from love
Born out of concern for all beings.”
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Buddha
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Morning Poem
Every morning
the world
is created.
Under the orange
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sticks of the sun
the heaped
ashes of the night
turn into leaves again
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and fasten themselves to the high branches –
and the ponds appear
like black cloth
on which are painted islands
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of summer lilies.
If it is your nature
to be happy
you will swim away along the soft trails
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for hours, your imagination
alighting everywhere.
And if your spirit
carries within it
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the thorn
that is heavier than lead —
if it’s all you can do
to keep on trudging —
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there is still
somewhere deep within you
a beast shouting that the earth
is exactly what it wanted —
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each pond with its blazing lilies
is a prayer heard and answered
lavishly,
every morning,
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whether or not
you have ever dared to be happy,
whether or not
you have ever dared to pray.
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Mary Oliver
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Sweet Darkness
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When your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
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When your vision has gone
no part of the world can find you.
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Time to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its own.
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There you can be sure
you are not beyond love.
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The dark will be your womb
tonight.
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The night will give you a horizon
further than you can see.
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You must learn one thing.
the world was made to be free in.
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Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
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Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
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anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
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is too small for you.
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David Whyte
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Some Kiss We Want
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There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of
spirit on the body.
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Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.
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And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling!
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At night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its
face against mine.
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Breathe into me.
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Close the language-door and
open the love window.
The moon
won’t use the door, only the window.
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Rumi
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CATHERINE L. JOHNSON 
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