Saturday's Poem: Optimism

tree

I went to Jane Hirshfield's poetry reading at UCSB last night––extraordinary and perceptive poems, and beautifully read.

A long-time student of Zen Buddhism, she has said, "My feeling is that the paths of poetry and of meditation are closely linked -- one is an attentiveness and awareness that exists in language, the other an attentiveness and awareness that exists in silence, but each is a way to attempt to penetrate experience thoroughly, to its core.”

She does indeed penetrate experience, and sums it up with breathtaking eloquence and insight. I left the reading inspired to try to live life on a whole new level, paying closer attention.

Here's one she read, on a subject dear to my heart:

OPTIMISM by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs – all this resinous, unretractable earth.