Excerpts: The Book of Poverty and Death, Rainier Maria Rilke's The Book of Hours

The big cities are not true; they betray
the day, the night, animals and children.
They lie with silence, they lie with noise
and with all that lets itself be used.

None of the vast events that move around you
happens there. In streets and alleys
your winds falter and churn,
and in frenzied traffic grow confused.

You who know, and whose vast knowing
is born of poverty, abundance of poverty--

make it so the poor are no longer
despised and thrown away.

Look at them standing about--
like wildflowers, which have nowhere else to grow.

-- Rainier Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours,
excerpts from Book III, The Book of Poverty and Death, pp. 13, 19

Tangled

When we try

to 

pick 

out 

anything 

by itself,

we find it
hitched to everything else in the Universe.

-- John Muir,
My First Summer in the Sierra
1911 | page 110

(arranged quote)

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

-- W.S. Merwin

This honor and privilege

It is an honor
and a privilege to
be alive,

however briefly,
on this marvelous planet
we call Earth.

- Edward Abbey
(arranged quote)

Pretty Chaotic

When we contemplate the whole globe as

one great dewdrop, striped and 

dotted with continents and islands, flying 

through space with other stars 

all singing and shining together as one, the 

whole universe appears as 

an infinite storm of beauty.

-- John Muir
Travels in Alaska
1915 | chapter 1 | page 5

(arranged quote)