Jane Hirshfield World Quotations

An ordinary hole beside a path through the woods might begin to open to altered worlds.

Go back to The October Palace, which came out in 1994, and there are poems with windows, doors, the rooms of the gorgeous and vanishing palace that is this ordinary world and ordinary life. Jungian archetype would say the house is a figure for the experienced, experiencing self.

It's more for me as with going into a forest: if you sit quietly for a long time, the life around you emerges. As the world grows ever more clamorous, my hunger for silence steepens. I unplug the landline.

Zen is less the study of doctrine than a set of tools for discovering what can be known when the world is looked at with open eyes.

Any woodthrush shows it - he sings, not to fill the world, but because he is filled.

In my poems though, as you say, the comic arrived fairly late. This doubtless has something to do with growing older. A person who's seen a bit of the world can't help but notice how foolish is the self-centeredness we bring to our tiny slice of existence.