Wilder Poetry Quotes

There is a wilderness we walk alone However well-companioned

Ô, Wanderess, Wanderess When did you feel your most euphoric kiss? Was I the source of your greatest bliss?

A book of verses underneath the bough A flask of wine, a loaf of bread and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness And wilderness is paradise now.

The sea is a desert of waves, A wilderness of water.

What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough, A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou Beside me singing in the Wilderness - And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Our lips were for each other and our eyes were full of dreams. We knew nothing of travel and we knew nothing of loss. Ours was a world of eternal spring, until the summer came.

All of us wild and fighting for our lives. In the fragrant wilderness of this blue night, my heart sings along with the other nocturnal beasts.

No one thought up being. He who thinks he has, step forward.

Chaos, leave me never, keep me wild and keep me free so that my brokenness will be, the only beauty the world will see.

He wanders, like a day-appearing dream, Through the dim wildernesses of the mind; Through desert woods and tracts, which seem Like ocean, homeless, boundless, unconfined.

Once through this ruined city did I pass I espied a lonely bird on a bough and asked ‘What knowest thou of this wilderness?’ It replied: 'I can sum it up in two words: ‘Alas, Alas!

She dances in a ring of fire and throws off the challenge with a shrug.

Outside is the only place we can truly be inside the world.

Fantasy is not antirational, but pararational; not realistic but surrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud's terminology, it employs primary not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes which, as Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

Nature is an outcry, unpolished truth; the art—a euphemism—tamed wilderness.

Refuse the old means of measurement. Rely instead on the thrumming wilderness of self. Listen. -From "Out West

Ô, Muse of the Heart’s Passion, let me relive my Love’s memory, to remember her body, so brave and so free, and the sound of my Dreameress singing to me, and the scent of my Dreameress sleeping by me, Ô, sing, sweet Muse, my soliloquy!

Away, away, from men and towns, To the wild wood and the downs— To the silent wilderness Where the soul need not repress Its music lest it should not find An echo in another's mind, While the touch of Nature's art Harmonizes heart to heart.

This assumption that she need look for no more devotion now that her beauty had passed proceeded from the fact that she had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed through a long servitude, through its own self-hatred, through mockery, through great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

Don't play with fire if you can't handle the flame.

I will hold the colour gold in my hands and show you how beautiful this life can be even when your eyes have forgotten how to see the light.

There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons, And I want to go back—and I will.

Time is slipping away and I'm worried that when I finally wake up, all that will be left is a room full of memories and a heart that lost its way.

Love's language is imprecise, fits more like mittens than gloves.

Some have won a wild delight, By daring wilder sorrow; Could I gain thy love to-night, I'd hazard death to-morrow.

Here in this endless and gleaming wilderness I was removed farther than ever from the world of men -- And I never saw so close and so clearly The image in the mirror of my own soul.

But I want to extol not the sweetness nor the placidity of the dog, but the wilderness out of which he cannot step entirely, and from which we benefit. For wilderness is our first home too, and in our wild ride into modernity with all its concerns and problems we need also all the good attachments to that origin that we can keep or restore. Dog is one of the messengers of that rich and still magical first world. The dog would remind us of the pleasures of the body with its graceful physicality, and the acuity and rapture of the senses, and the beauty of forest and ocean and rain and our own breath. There is not a dog that romps and runs but we learn from him. The other dog—the one that all its life walks leashed and obedient down the sidewalk—is what a chair is to a tree. It is a possession only, the ornament of a human life. Such dogs can remind us of nothing large or noble or mysterious or lost. They cannot make us sweeter or more kind. Only unleashed dogs can do that. They are a kind of poetry themselves when they are devoted not only to us but to the wet night, to the moon and the rabbit-smell in the grass and their own bodies leaping forward.

these rivers run like they are trying to find somewhere else to call home. maybe i'm just trying to do the same.

I've always been told that I was born chasing sunsets, but sometimes I wonder if I'm really just trying to find a way to be in two places at once.

The dim, dusty room, with the busts staring down from the tall bookcases, the cozy chairs, the globes, and best of all, the wilderness of books in which she could wander where she liked, made the library a region of bliss to her. The moment Aunt March took her nap, or was busy with company, Jo hurried to this quiet place, and curling herself up in the easy chair, devoured poetry, romance, history, travels, and pictures like a regular bookworm.

Even speech was for them was a debased form of silence; how much more futile is poetry which is a debased form of speech.

Isn't beautiful the way we see things change? the way our eyes fall in love with a different time of day knowing that it will never hurt when tomorrow comes.

I'm still trying to find the parts of me I left hidden between pages of a story I never wanted to forget, but you were always in the last place I looked.

I am not where you left me. I am all the places I have never been.

sometimes falling rain carries memories of betrayal there in the woods where she was not meant to be too young she believes in her right to be free in her body free from harm believing nature a wilderness she can enter be solaced believing the power that there be sacred place that there can be atonement now she returns with no fear facing the past ready to risk knowing these woods now hold beauty and danger

From the first note I knew it was different from anything I had ever heard.... It began simply, but with an arresting phrase, so simple, but eloquent as a human voice. It spoke, beckoning gently as it unwound, rising and tensing. It spiraled upward, the tension growing with each repeat of the phrasing, and yet somehow it grew more abandoned, wilder with each note. His eyes remained closed as his fingers flew over the strings, spilling forth surely more notes than were possible from a single violin. For one mad moment I actually thought there were more of them, an entire orchestra of violins spilling out of this one instrument. I had never heard anything like it--it was poetry and seduction and light and shadow and every other contradiction I could think of. It seemed impossible to breathe while listening to that music, and yet all I was doing was breathing, quite heavily. The music itself had become as palpable a presence in that room as another person would have been--and its presence was something out of myth.

The Fallen It was the night a comet with its silver tail fell through darkness to earth's eroded field, the night I found the wolf, starved in metal trap, teeth broken from pain's hard bite, its belly swollen with unborn young. In our astronomy the Great Wolf lived in the sky. It was the mother of all women and howled her daughter's names into the winds of night. But the new people, whatever stepped inside their shadow, they would kill, whatever crossed their path, they came to fear. In their science, Wolf as not the mother. Wolf was not wind. They did not learn healing from her song. In their stories Wolf was the devil, falling down an empty, shrinking universe, God's Lucifer with yellow eyes that had seen their failings and knew that they could kill the earth, that they would kill each other. That night I threw the fallen stone back to sky and falling stars and watched it all come down to ruined earth again. Sky would not take back what it had done. That night, sky was a wilderness so close the eerie light of heaven and storming hands of sun reached down the swollen belly and dried up nipples of a hungry world. That night, I saw the trapper's shadow and it had four legs.

At any time, and under any circumstances of human interest, is it not strange to see how little real hold the objects of the natural world amid which we live can gain on our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in trouble, and sympathy in joy, only in books. Admiration of those beauties of the inanimate world, which modern poetry so largely and so eloquently describes, is not, even in the best of us, one of the original instincts of our nature.

I tried to take a shortcut to your heart instead I got lost in the wilderness of my own desire.

Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.

The moon looks wonderful in this warm evening light, just as a candle flame looks beautiful in the light of morning. Light withing light. It seems like a metaphor for something. So much does. Ralph Waldo Emerson is excellent on this point. It seems to me to be a metaphor for the human soul, the singular light within the great general light of existence. Or it seems like poetry within language. Perhaps wisdom within experience. Or marriage within friendship and love. I'll try to remember to use this. I believe I see a place for it in my thoughts on Hagar and Ishmael. Their time in the wilderness seems like a specific moment of divine Providence within the whole providential regime of Creation.

Another struggle has been the struggle to keep the value of a local and particular character, of a particular culture in this awful maelstrom, this awful avalanche toward uniformity. The whole fight is for the conservation of the individual soul. The enemy is the supression of history; against us is the bewildering propaganda and brainwash, luxury and violence. Sixty years ago, poetry was the poor man’s art: a man off on the edge of the wilderness, or Frémont, going off with a Greek text in his pocket. A man who wanted the best could have it on a lonely farm. Then there was the cinema, and now television.

Harp of the North, farewell! The hills grow dark, On purple peaks a deeper shade descending; In twilight copse the glow-worm lights her spark, The deer, half seen, are to the covert wending. Resume thy wizard elm! the fountain lending, And the wild breeze, thy wilder minstrelsy; Thy numbers sweet with nature's vespers blending, With distant echo from the fold and lea, And herd-boy's evening pipe, and hum of housing bee.

a heart was made to live in the dark; maybe we were, too.

it's a hopeless thing, this speaking your name wondering if you will hear me.

Don't spend your time worrying about the bridges they burned when they are already under you.

Extending the Airport Runway The good citizens of the commission cast their votes for more of everything. Very early in the morning I go out to the pale dunes, to look over the empty spaces of the wilderness. For something is there, something is there when nothing is there but itself, that is not there when anything else is. Alas, the good citizens of the commission have never seen it, whatever it is, formless, yet palpable. Very shining, very delicate. Very rare.

There is no sentimentality here. We need dirt under our nails and smoke stiffening our hair. We need salt drying on our chests, and bramble snagged calves. We must dedicate ourselves to forty days in the wilderness rather than our five minutes of fame. Magic must become more savage if it is to have any meaning in the world, any power. Myths are not to be draped about poetry, they come from the very substance of the earth, this is the mask we must wear. Be fierce from this understanding taking root.

This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

it is good to fold poetry into our prayer life.

My herald thought into a wilderness: There let its trumpet blow, and quickly dress My uncertain path with green, that I may speed Easily onward, thorough flowers and weed.

Cry out in the wilderness with a voice that's not heard. Speak boldly in Christ though you won't say a word.

My verse, my blood.

i see surrender on the horizon, and as the sun says goodbye in shades of rose, i look up and remember that leaving can be beautiful and coming back can be, too.

one day i will remember this bravery— this storm beneath my skin. you couldn’t see me, but you knew i was coming.

You were the walking streak of thunder In my world You were like a song during the cool breeze And now In the wilderness without you How will I find my way

Before you have your dreams, your dreams have you, and every day pushes a night before it while the wilderness follows.

To those who stand naked in the holy wilderness of life, embracing all shadows of self, I bow to you.

What is fantasy? On one level, of course, it is a game: a pure pretense with no ulterior motive whatever. It is one child saying to another child, “Let’s be dragons,” and then they’re dragons for an hour or two. It is escapism of the most admirable kind—the game played for the game’s sake. On another level, it is still a game, but a game played for very high stakes. Seen thus, as art, not spontaneous play, its affinity is not with daydream, but with dream. It is a different approach to reality, an alternative technique for apprehending and coping with existence. It is not antirational but pararational; not realistic, but surrealistic, superrealistic, a heightening of reality. In Freud’s terminology, it employs primary, not secondary process thinking. It employs archetypes, which, Jung warned us, are dangerous things. Dragons are more dangerous, and a good deal commoner, than bears. Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe. And their guides, the writers of fantasy, should take their responsibilities seriously.

Picnic, Lightning It is possible to be struck by a meteor or a single-engine plane while reading in a chair at home. Safes drop from rooftops and flatten the odd pedestrian mostly within the panels of the comics, but still, we know it is possible, as well as the flash of summer lightning, the thermos toppling over, spilling out on the grass. And we know the message can be delivered from within. The heart, no valentine, decides to quit after lunch, the power shut off like a switch, or a tiny dark ship is unmoored into the flow of the body’s rivers, the brain a monastery, defenseless on the shore. This is what I think about when I shovel compost into a wheelbarrow, and when I fill the long flower boxes, then press into rows the limp roots of red impatiens— the instant hand of Death always ready to burst forth from the sleeve of his voluminous cloak. Then the soil is full of marvels, bits of leaf like flakes off a fresco, red-brown pine needles, a beetle quick to burrow back under the loam. Then the wheelbarrow is a wilder blue, the clouds a brighter white, and all I hear is the rasp of the steel edge against a round stone, the small plants singing with lifted faces, and the click of the sundial as one hour sweeps into the next.

and we are one one being in an infinite ocean filled with starfish and galaxies and black holed sunfish frolics somewhere near encinitas beside the swami waves (you know - the one's who teach inside the hurricane's eye!)

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth.

And Ásta Sóllilja, it was she who swept on wings of poetry into those spheres which she had sensed as if in distant murmur one spring night last year when she was reading about the little girl who journeyed over the seven mountains; and the distant murmur had suddenly swelled to a song in her ears, and her soul found here for the first time its origin and its descent; happiness, fate, sorrow, she understood them all; and many other things. When a man looks at a flowering plant growing slender and helpless up in the wilderness among a hundred thousand stones, and he has found this plant only by chance, then he asks: Why is it that life is always trying to burst forth? Should one pull up this plant and use it to clean one's pipe? No, for this plant also broods over the limitation and the unlimitation of all life, and lives in the love of the good beyond these hundred thousand stones, like you and me; water it with care, but do not uproot it, maybe it is little Ásta Sóllilja.

The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological tablets in order to print his handbills and town-meeting warrants on them. Before he has learned his a b c in the beautiful but mystic lore of the wilderness he cuts it down, puts up a "deestrict" schoolhouse, and introduces Webster's spelling-book.

The Anglo-American can indeed cut down and grub up all this waving forest, and make a stump speech on its ruins, but he cannot converse with the spirit of the tree he fells, he cannot read the poetry and mythology which retire as he advances. He ignorantly erases mythological

writing home" here in the wilderness of australia writing home becomes easy in spite of the spreading wild fires there is less heat, more certainty. writing home, writing this i think of those without real homes– our city, people say, provides houses which do not, often, bring one home.

I just lay on the bed, lost in the wilderness of a completely new world as the clock continued ticking long into the night. It was a world of poetry. It was a world of dolphins where the sea kissed the sky. It was the world of love – a world I had never been at and yet have never felt so familiar.

Poetry,' she said with scorn. 'I hate poetry. It's just this. This is all there is. This stupid city.' He went cold with dread. What was she saying, what had she done? It was like a blasphemy, it was like an act of desecration. Though how could he expect her to maintain faith in something he himself had so blatantly failed?

He is a Londoner, too, in his writings. In his familiar letters he displays a rambling urban vivacity, a tendency to to veer off the point and to muddle his syntax. He had a brilliantly eclectic mind, picking up words and images while at the same time forging them in new and unexpected combinations. He conceived several ideas all at once, and sometimes forgot to separate them into their component parts. This was true of his lectures, too, in which brilliant perceptions were scattered in a wilderness of words. As he wrote on another occasion, "The lake babbled not less, and the wind murmured not, nor the little fishes leaped for joy that their tormentor was not." This strangely contorted and convoluted style also characterizes his verses, most of which were appended as commentaries upon his paintings. Like Blake, whose prophetic books bring words and images in exalted combination, Turner wished to make a complete statement. Like Blake, he seemed to consider the poet's role as being in part prophetic. His was a voice calling in the wilderness, and, perhaps secretly, he had an elevated sense of his status and his vocation. And like Blake, too, he was often considered to be mad. He lacked, however, the poetic genius of Blake - compensated perhaps by the fact that by general agreement he is the greater artist.

Poetry was the way out then, for young people who wanted some exit from the lumpen bourgeoisie and the shackles of respectable wage-earning. It was what painting had been at the turn of the century. Richard knows this now, although he did not then. He doesn't know what the equivalent is at the moment. Film-making, he'd guess, for those with intellectual pretensions.

Columbus and his successors were not coming into an empty wilderness, but into a world which in some places was as densely populated as Europe itself, where the culture was complex, where human relations were more egalitarian than in Europe, and where the relations among men, women, children, and nature were more beautifully worked out than perhaps any place in the world. They were people without a written language, but with their own laws, their poetry, their history kept in memory and passed on, in an oral vocabulary more complex than Europe’s, accompanied by song, dance, and ceremonial drama. They paid careful attention to the development of personality, intensity of will, independence and flexibility, passion and potency, to their partnership with one another and with nature.

I walked to Mairangi Bay beach, day after day, seeking companionship in the roar of the ocean, and contemplating the shipwreck of my life. There, in that isolated wilderness, amidst the screaming gulls, and consistent rhythm of the tides, I channeled my chaotic thoughts through my pen and released them into poetry, until the quiet desperation passed and I was secure in the knowledge that I had made it through another day.

Back home, Huxley drew from this experience to compose a series of audacious attacks against the Romantic love of wilderness. The worship of nature, he wrote, is "a modern, artificial, and somewhat precarious invention of refined minds." Byron and Wordsworth could only rhapsodize about their love of nature because the English countryside had already been "enslaved to man." In the tropics, he observed, where forests dripped with venom and vines, Romantic poets were notably absent. Tropical peoples knew something Englishmen didn't. "Nature," Huxley wrote, "is always alien and inhuman, and occasionally diabolic." And he meant always: Even in the gentle woods of Westermain, the Romantics were naive in assuming that the environment was humane, that it would not callously snuff out their lives with a bolt of lightning or a sudden cold snap. After three days amid the Tuckamore, I was inclined to agree.

The point is she raised herself into a new life by sheer force of will,” Vincent’s mother had said, and Vincent wondered even at the time—she would have been about eleven—what that statement might suggest about how happy Vincent’s mother was about the way her own life had gone, this woman who’d imagined writing poetry in the wilderness but somehow found herself sunk in the mundane difficulties of raising a child and running a household in the wilderness instead.

.. I am free to walk on the moors - but when I go out there alone - everything reminds me of the times when others were with me and the the moors seem a wilderness, featureless, solitary, saddening. My sister Emily had a particular love for them, and there is not a knoll of heather, not a branch of fern, not a young bilberry leaf not a fluttering lark or linnet but reminds me of her. The distant prospects were Anne's delight, and when I look around, she is in the blue tints, the pale mists, the waves and shadows of the horizon. In the hillcountry silence their poetry comes by lines and stanzas into my mind: once I loved it, now I dare not read it, and am driven often to wish I could taste one draught of oblivion and forget much that, whilde mind remains, I never shall forget. Many people seem to recall their departed relatives with a sort of melancholy complacency - but I think these have not watched them through lingering sickness nor witnessed their last moments - it is these reminiscences that stand by your bedside at night, and rise at your pillow in the morning. (Charlotte's letter to Williams, in which she express how much she misses her sisters)

Holy Trinity (The Sonnet) Civilization is founded on 3 pillars, Conscience, courage and compassion. Without these three there is no society, Only a prehistoric mockery of civilization. When all three come together, lo and behold, Here rises the holy trinity - the holy trident! You can use it to plough the land of creation, Or use it to devour the divisions most obstinate. Wasting precious lifeforce chanting like a parrot, Do not go chasing fiction out in the wilderness. Wipe the rust off your heart that causes all the drag, And you my friend, shall be the incorruptible trident. However, in reality, there are no three, but only one. The spirit of love and oneness is beyond time and form.

He never learned her, quite. Year after year that territory, without seasons, shifted under his eye. An hour he could be lost in the walled anger of her quarried hurt on turning, see cool water laughing where the day before there were stones in her voice. He charted. She made wilderness again. Roads disappeared. The map was never true. Wind brought him rain sometimes, tasting of sea— and suddenly she would change the shape of shores faultlessly calm. All, all was each day new; the shadows of her love shortened or grew like trees seen from an unexpected hill, new country at each jaunty helpless journey. So he accepted that geography, constantly strange. Wondered. Stayed home increasingly to find his way among the landscapes of her mind.

Silent remembering is a form of prayer. No fragrance is more enchanting to re-experience than the aromatic bouquet gleaned from inhaling the cherished memories of our pastimes. We regularly spot elderly citizens sitting alone gently rocking themselves while facing the glowing sun. Although these sun worshipers might appear lonely in their state of serene solitude, they are not alone at all, because they deeply enmesh themselves in recalling the glimmering memories of days gone by. Marcel Proust wrote “In Search of Time Lost,” “As with the future, it is not all at once but grain by grain that one savors the past.” Test tasting the honeycombed memories of their bygone years, a delicate smile play out on their rose thin lips. The mellow tang of sweet tea memories – childhood adventures, coming of age rituals, wedding rites, recreational jaunts, wilderness explorations, viewing and creating art, literature, music, and poetry, sharing in the mystical experiences of life, and time spent with family – is the brew of irresistible intoxicants that we all long to sip as we grow old. The nectar mashed from a collection of choice memories produces a tray of digestible vignettes that each of us lovingly roll our silky tongues over. On the eve of lying down for the last time in the stillness of our cradled deathbeds, we will swaddle ourselves with a blanket of heartfelt love and whisper a crowning chaplet of affection for all of humanity. After all, we been heaven blessed to take with us to our final resting place an endless scroll amassing the kiss soft memories of time yore.

These days many poets live in cities, or at least in suburbs, and the natural world grows ever more distant from our everyday lives. Most people, in fact, live in cities, and therefore most readers are not necessarily very familiar with the natural world. And yet the natural world has always been the great warehouse of symbolic imagery. Poetry is one of the ancient arts, and it began, as did all the fine arts, within the original wilderness of the earth. Also, it began through the process of seeing, and feeling, and hearing, and smelling, and touching, and then remembering—I mean remembering in words—what these perceptual experiences were like, while trying to describe the endless invisible fears and desires of our inner lives. The poet used the actual, known event or experience to elucidate the inner, invisible experience—or, in other words, the poet used figurative language, relying for those figures on the natural world.

One UniVerse for the Living While palaces attest to the power of men, And monuments mark their wars, Little remains of the women who've been- Except for the sons that they bore. But the voices of women were baked into bread And later buttered with epics While the souls of their daughters Stitched with fine thread Became tapestries stored in attics. And all through the ages Men boasted like beasts Erecting pillars of marble and stone, But still they found themselves only to be Sculpted of flesh and bone. Philosophers pondered the nature of gods Outlawing temptations that plagued them And earning themselves, against all odds, The power to punish the pagans. By writing themselves into sacred books The clergymen sealed our fate To follow decrees that have their roots In nothing but misguided hate. So, children of Adam and invisible Eve, challenge the wisdom of sages. Don’t be so sure sacred scrolls that you read Aren't filled with human pages. Walk in the wilderness. Eat of the fruit. Don't let them buy you with wages. Plant your own garden. Drink of the wine. Learn how to be courageous. Hearts that are hardened To what is divine Have honored the dead too long. Search for the stories Baked into bread And eat until you are strong.

The trends speak to an unavoidable truth. Society's future will be challenged by zoonotic viruses, a quite natural prediction, not least because humanity is a potent agent of change, which is the essential fuel of evolution. Notwithstanding these assertions, I began with the intention of leaving the reader with a broader appreciation of viruses: they are not simply life's pathogens. They are life's obligate partners and a formidable force in nature on our planet. As you contemplate the ocean under a setting sun, consider the multitude of virus particles in each milliliter of seawater: flying over wilderness forestry, consider the collective viromes of its living inhabitants. The stunnig number and diversity of viruses in our environment should engender in us greater awe that we are safe among these multitudes than fear that they will harm us. Personalized medicine will soon become a reality and medical practice will routinely catalogue and weigh a patient's genome sequence. Not long thereafter one might expect this data to be joined by the patient's viral and bacterial metagenomes: the patient's collective genetic identity will be recorded in one printout. We will doubtless discover some of our viral passengers are harmful to our health, while others are protective. But the appreciation of viruses that I hope you have gained from these pages is not about an exercise in accounting. The balancing of benefit versus threat to humanity is a fruitless task. The viral metagenome will contain new and useful gene functionalities for biomedicine: viruses may become essential biomedical tools and phages will continue to optimize may also accelerate the development of antibiotic drug resistance in the post-antibiotic era and emerging viruses may threaten our complacency and challenge our society economically and socially. Simply comparing these pros and cons, however, does not do justice to viruses and acknowledge their rightful place in nature. Life and viruses are inseparable. Viruses are life's complement, sometimes dangerous but always beautiful in design. All autonomous self-sustaining replicating systems that generate their own energy will foster parasites. Viruses are the inescapable by-products of life's success on the planet. We owe our own evolution to them; the fossils of many are recognizable in ERVs and EVEs that were certainly powerful influences in the evolution of our ancestors. Like viruses and prokaryotes, we are also a patchwork of genes, acquired by inheritance and horizontal gene transfer during our evolution from the primitive RNA-based world. It is a common saying that 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.' It is a natural response to a visual queue: a sunset, the drape of a designer dress, or the pattern of a silk tie, but it can also be found in a line of poetry, a particularly effective kitchen implement, or even the ruthless efficiency of a firearm. The latter are uniquely human acknowledgments of beauty in design. It is humanity that allows us to recognize the beauty in the evolutionary design of viruses. They are unique products of evolution, the inevitable consequence of life, infectious egotistical genetic information that taps into life and the laws of nature to fuel evolutionary invention.

A realm that is beautiful and spiritual, sustaining and transforming- we take for granted those attitudes toward the wild, but they were all but unknown in the West before the Deists and Romantics. Instead the wild was generally seen as loathsome and hideous, fearsome and threatening, desolate and evil and devilish. Hence, romantic and deist thought represents a transformation in our relationship to the natural world so profound it is difficult now to imagine it. Alexander von Humboldt was an international superstar, and his hugely influential science dispensed with God or the divine and proposed that romantic awe in the face of sublime wilderness derives from our “communion with nature” as a magisterial presence, “a unity in diversity of phenomena; a harmony, blending together all created things, one great whole animated by the breath of life.” Humboldt’s revolutionary ideas…were transformative for Thoreau, and for Walt Whitman, who kept Humboldt’s books on his desk as he wrong “Song of Myself.

I may be emotionally rude, but the view is still beautiful.

You didn't want to leave, but you never asked me to stay.

That's the thing about me. I'm always leaving pieces of myself behind for others to keep and for once I don't feel empty.

I am tired of chasing things that want to leave. - the sun, moon, and you

I am not where you left me. I am all the paces I have never been.

Our feelings and our eyes I asked her, “Irma, what have you done?” She looked at me and replied, “nothing!” I cannot find few of my heart beats a lot seems undone, But there was a feeling that reminded me of something, And I tracked the rhythm of my every heart beat, Which led just to one trace, That whenever I see her and our eyes meet, My heart loses its pace, And there goes my heart beat missing in between this space, The distance between her eyes and mine, Though we stand on the same ground at the same place, Yet my heart beats rush towards her making a bee line, Just to beat closer to her heart, To feel her warmth and swim in the sea of her feelings, And as these love seeking heart beats depart, My heart cries in its painful reelings, Where it finds itself left in the wilderness of nowhere, She is there, her heart is there too, But our eyes still tend to wander somewhere, Where she is willing to say I love you, But her heart beats are yet to feel the miracle of a missing heart beat, That always rushes unto me, Creating love’s fondest retreat, Where wherever I may see, I see her and she only sees me, This is the distance that grows in the eyes, That only these missing heart beats can shorten, Just like when I look at those skies, I am always by her beauty smitten, Her eyes, her smiles, her face and her sweet ways, Are actually the twinkle that the night stars bear, And ah their pain on those Sunny and bright days, When they long to see her, But today, she looked at me and I felt she plugged into my spirit, And a heart beat unknown sank into me with it, Then she started beating in my every heart beat, And how I loved my heart beat, and repeat and repeat, With every heartbeat, “I love you too.” And then the distance in our eyes vanished suddenly, As I held her in my arms and said, “I was born to love you!” And then our two hearts, beat as one and forever happily.

I could be King and you could be Queen. And we could buzz louder than bees. Love wilder than the woods. We could just be. We're heroes today. Just today.

To move in and take over cities, squirrels needed an ally to reshape their landscapes. They found that ally in Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted introduced the idea that cities should contain large tracts of idealized wilderness (his most famous design was New York’s Central Park). It was ideal for reading poetry in the shade or wandering with a friend, but mostly, it was ideal for being a squirrel.

A veil Separating two worlds Of which, both I was created from Of which, both I still reside This cloth Now a threshold Lays over my body, gently Casting its covering over my crystalized vision I peer through each separation of thread With a breath that comes in slowly And an exhale that leaves me with more questions than I have answers for Each one creating the liminal space that becomes me With just one word The unknown becomes existence, once more Around me and through me and in me The torn garment slides downwards over my eyes In the same way dawn pulls with it a blanket of light Over barren land come morning It continues its path Cascading down the blackness of my hair Sweeping over the olive of my skin Falling between the creation of my own hands Hands that have grasped, and strived, and toiled Struggling to reconcile all that I have once believed In the silence between breaths I hear the sound of The Eternal Calling for me In my stillness I am carried out of the garden Into the desert Delivered out from my own will Into the arms of The Burren The wilderness of ancient hills Built upon lamentations That of my own That of the world before and to come My skin, now bare of its cloth Stripped of all notion Held to the bosom of the Earth A relentless hold Until I remember Just Who I Am

With the raw-ribbed Wild that abhors all life, the Wild that would crush and rend, I have clinched and closed with the naked North, I have learned to defy and defend; Shoulder to shoulder we have fought it out—yet the Wild must win in the end.

The words of a good book may be profuse, but the words of a good poem are profound.

In Ephesians 2:10, Paul uses the Greek word poiema, which literally means God’s poetry. When poiema is translated as “handiwork” or “workmanship” it misses the following important point. Poetry in scripture does not rhyme sounds; it follows the Hebrew pattern and rhymes thoughts. This means that as God’s poetry, our thoughts can rhyme with our Heavenly Father’s. That is amazing! How can it work? We know that as we become intimate with someone, we begin to finish each other’s sentences and thoughts. In a deep, authentic, mutual-mind state, we actually don’t know where our thoughts stop and the other person’s thoughts begin. This is exactly what can happen between God and us too. A mutual-mind state with God results in an emulation of His character and heart; we are showing the world the poet behind the poetry. As our mutual-mind state becomes stronger, we are able to live out our purpose of being created for good works.

Eyes as dark as devil’s Mouth twisted in a salacious grin The wilderness was the attire Of the killer and its black fiend

i think you have to chase it. that thing that tells you... keep. going. that there are wilder sunsets and more colors to know. that there are still answers for what's pulling at you. that the emptiness and heartbreak aren't where love will leave you because somewhere there is a lover who will kiss you like you have poetry and addiction on your lips and who needs your touch and taste like mercy on their soul. and there are all those virgin, unfelt things in you; still untouched and tender and unfolding. so you have to keep searching. for all that soul stuff. until your intangible aches are in the flesh, and that fire within you is spilling all around you... i think you have to keep going.

This [Welsh] language seems to be more particularly adapted for poetry; which, however extraordinary it may seem to some, on account of the multiplicity of gutturals and consonants with which it abounds, has the softness and harmony of the Italian, with the majesty and expression of the Greek.

some days, i'm delicate like daisies; the other ones, i'm the savage wilderness. there are moments i feel light like the gentle breeze from the ocean, then again, there are nights i feel my burden. i can own my skin, my soul, my style on a couple days of the week, but somehow, someway, insecurities fill in the gaps of this self love i'm practicing. and for a few minutes, i feel like i'm drowning under the weight of my sorrows but then i breath and remind this heart - i am, i exist and i matter.

Divided hearts is what I am now Forever alone in the wilderness