I found you
playing a violin
in the forest
the Great Lakes
were almost empty
I walked out
with my nephews
to the middle
of Lake Huron
during the recession
the gantries
were terribly sad
playing a song
with the wind
the useless lighthouses
cost one dollar
to feel them
swaying all alone
except one ghost
still feeling useful
lighting the lamps

Matthew Rohrer

Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

Erica Jong

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadows. It’s what the sunflowers do.

Helen Keller

All my days I have longed equally to travel the right road and to take my own errant path.

Sigrid Undset

Teach the children. We don’t matter so much, but the children do. Show them daisies and the pale hepatica. Teach them the taste of sassafras and wintergreen. The lives of the blue sailors, mallow, sunbursts, the moccasin flowers. And the frisky ones – inkberry, lamb’s-quarters, blueberries. And the aromatic ones – rosemary, oregano. Give them peppermint to put in their pockets as they go to school. Give them the fields and the woods and the possibility of the world salvaged from the lords of profit. Stand them in the stream, head them upstream, rejoice as they learn to love this space they live in, its sticks and leaves and then the silent, beautiful blossoms.

Mary Oliver