I too have known loneliness.

I too have known what it is to feel misunderstood,

rejected, and not at all

beautiful.

Oh, mother earth,

your comfort is great.

Your arms never withhold.

It has saved my life to know this.

Your rivers flowing, your roses,

opening in the morning.

Oh, motions of tenderness!

Mary Oliver

Time does not give one much leeway: it thrusts us forward from behind, blows us through the narrow tunnel of the present into the future. But space is broad, teeming with possibilities, positions, intersections, passages, detours, U-turns, dead-ends, one-way streets. Too many possibilities, indeed.

Susan Sontag

There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time.

Ray Bradbury

We sleep in the desert

on a land full of stories,

and all night the wind reads the news…

We wake to a world without word,

only scent and beauty.

The Word is written

everywhere on the land.

Laura Girardeau

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

John Lubbock