“At the word witch, we imagine the horrible old crones from Macbeth.
But the cruel trials witches suffered teach us the opposite.
Many perished precisely because they were young and beautiful.”
— André Breton
“Looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
An thinking of the days that are no more.
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
Autumn Dreams
Mortimer Crane Brown
“I know the year is dying,
Soon the summer will be dead.
I can trace it in the flying
Of the black crows overhead;
I can hear it in the rustle
Of the dead leaves as I pass,
And the south wind’s plaintive sighing
Through the dry and withered grass.
Ah, ’tis then I love to wander,
Wander idly and alone,
Listening to the solemn music
Of sweet nature’s undertone;
Wrapt in thoughts I cannot utter,
Dreams my tongue cannot express,
Dreams that match the autumn’s sadness
In their longing tenderness.”
“Autumn is marching on: even the scarecrows are wearing dead leaves.”
– Otsuyu Nakagawa
The Glass Door
– Henrik Nordbrandt,
Translated by Thomas Satterlee
“Like someone who opens a door of glass
or sees his own reflection in it
when he returns from the woods
the light falls so variously here at the end of October
that nothing is whole or can be made into a whole
because the cracks are too uncertain and constantly moving.
Then you experience the miracle
of entering into yourself like a diamond
in glass, enjoying its own fragility
when the storm carries everything else away
including the memory of a freckled girlfriend
out over the bluing lake hidden behind the bare hills.”
“You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going,
because you might not get there.” — Yogi Berra
The Peace of Wild Things
Wendell Berry
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound,
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water,
and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water,
and I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
The Ghost
Sara Teasdale
I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
But my heart was full of my new love’s glory,
My eyes were laughing and unafraid.
I met one who had loved me madly
And told his love for all to hear —
But we talked of a thousand things together,
The past was buried too deep to fear.
I met the other, whose love was given
With never a kiss and scarcely a word —
Oh, it was then the terror took me
Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.
Oh, love that lives its life with laughter
Or love that lives its life with tears
Can die — but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years.
.
.
.
I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
My heart was full of my new love’s glory, —
But my eyes were suddenly afraid.
I think we dream so we don’t have to be apart so long.
If we’re in each other’s dreams, we can play together all night.
~Bill Watterson, Calvin & Hobbes
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt
“They are not long, the days of wine and roses.
Out of a misty dream, our path emerges for a while, then closes, within a dream.”
― Ernest Dowson
Maverick Mist 