William Stafford: Wisdom Is Having Things Right In Your Life and Knowing Why

 Quotes and Poems by William Stafford

 

I have woven a parachute out of everything broken.

 

Please think about this as you go on. Breathe on the world. Hold out your hands to it. When morning and evenings roll along, watch how they open and close, how they invite you to the long party that your life is.

 

Everyone is born a poet — a person discovering the way words sound and work, caring and delighting in words. I just kept on doing what everyone starts out doing. The real question is: Why did other people stop?

 

Kids: they dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music. 

 

I embrace emerging experience, I participate in discovery. I am a butterfly. I am not a butterfly collector. I want the experience of the butterfly.  

 

You can treat experience as a set of surprises on which to exercise your quirky self.

 

And the things you know before you hear them; these are you and the reason you are in the world.

 

Once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold, found some limit beyond the waterfall, a season changes and we come back changed but safe, quiet, grateful.

 

Even the upper end of the river believes in the ocean. 

 

The root and the flower have to trust each other. If the root does not trust, the plant won't blossom.

 

Wisdom is having things right in your life and knowing why.

*****

 

Ask Me

Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made.  Ask me whether
what I have done is my life.  Others
have come in their slow way into
my thought, and some have tried to help
or to hurt: ask me what difference
their strongest love or hate has made.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait.  We know
the current is there, hidden; and there
are comings and goings from miles away
that hold the stillness exactly before us.
What the river says, that is what I say.

*****

The Way It Is 

There’s a thread you follow. It goes among
things that change. But it doesn’t change.
People wonder about what you are pursuing.
You have to explain about the thread.
But it is hard for others to see.
While you hold it you can’t get lost.
Tragedies happen; people get hurt
or die; and you suffer and get old.
Nothing you do can stop time’s unfolding.
You don’t ever let go of the thread.

 

*****

 

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am

and I don't know the kind of person you are

a pattern that others made may prevail in the world

and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,

a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break

sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood

storming out to play through the broken dike.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,

but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,

I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,

a remote important region in all who talk:

though we could fool each other, we should consider—

lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

 

*****

 

Assurance

You will never be alone, you hear so deep 

a sound when autumn comes. Yellow 

pulls across the hills and thrums, 

or the silence after lightening before it says 

its names- and then the clouds' wide-mouthed 

apologies. You were aimed from birth: 

you will never be alone. Rain 

will come, a gutter filled, an Amazon, 

long aisles- you never heard so deep a sound, 

moss on rock, and years. You turn your head- 

that's what the silence meant: you're not alone. 

The whole wide world pours down.

 

*****

 

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado, 

earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen. 

Or sunshine, love, salvation.

 

It could, you know. That’s why we wake 

and look out––no guarantees

in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning, 

like right now, like noon,

like evening.