Winter Recipes from the Collective

“The beautiful golden days when you were soon to be dying but could still enter into random conversations with strangers, random but also deliberate, so impressions of the world were still forming and changing you, and the city was at its most radiant, uncrowded in summer though by then everything was happening more slowly--”

PoetryChangeDyingPoemSummer

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“Outside the car, the cows and pastures are drifting away; they look calm, but calm is not the truth. Despair is the truth. This is what mother and father know. All hope is lost. We must return to where it was lost if we want to find it again.”

PoetryHopePoemDespairCalmnessFamilies

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“Obviously my mind is not what it was, she said. Most of my facts have disappeared, but certain underlying principles have been in consequence exposed with surprising clarity.”

MindPoetryBrainPoemAgingClarity

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“How heavy my mind is, filled with the past. Is there enough room for the world to penetrate? It must go somewhere, it cannot simply sit on the surface-- Stars gleaming over the water. The leaves piled, waiting to be lit. Insight, my sister said. Now it is here. But hard to see in the darkness. You must find your footing before you put your weight on it.”

ThinkingPastPoetryHistoryPoemThoughtsInsights

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“I see, he said, that you no longer wish to resume your former life, to move, that is, in a straight line as time suggests we do, but rather (here he gestured toward the lake) in a circle which aspires to the stillness at the heart of things, though I prefer to think it also resembles a clock.”

LifePoetryChangePoemStillness

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“Look at us, she said. We are all of us in this room still waiting to be transformed. This is why we search for love. We search for it all of our lives, even after we find it.”

LovePoetryWaitingPoemTransformation

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“The concierge, I realized, had been standing beside me. Do not be sad, he said. You have begun your own journey, not into the world, like your friend’s, but into yourself and your memories. As they fall away, perhaps you will attain that enviable emptiness into which all things flow, like the empty cup in the Daodejing— Everything is change, he said, and everything is connected. Also everything returns, but what returns is not what went away—”

PoetryChangeMemoriesPoemJourneys

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“If you can't read, my sister said, can you be happy?”

HappinessPoetryReadingBooksPoem

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“The part of life devoted to contemplation was at odds with the part committed to action.”

ActionPoetryPoemContemplationContradictions

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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“I have never been much good with living things. Brightness and darkness I do rather well with.”

PoetryDarknessPoemLiving ThingsLightness

Book:Winter Recipes from the Collective

Source: Winter Recipes from the Collective

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