Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds singing sutras to this suffering world. I heard them too, this morning, which must mean, since we will always have a suffering world, we must also always have a song.
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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.
~ Jane Hirshfield from "Optimism" in GIVEN SUGAR, GIVEN SALT: POEMS