Based on your responses to the previous seven questions, what do you feel is the healthiest and most sustainable way to live your life?
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Option #1
“Inside You and Far Beyond You”
The road seen, then not seen, the hillside
hiding then revealing the way you should take,
the road dropping away from you as if leaving you
to walk on thin air, then catching you, holding you up,
when you thought you would fall – and the way forward
always in the end, the way that you came, the way
that you followed, the way that carried you into your future,
that brought you to this place, no matter that
it sometimes had to take your promise from you,
no matter that it always had to break your heart
along the way: the sense of having walked
from far inside yourself out into the revelation,
to have risked yourself for something that seemed
to stand both inside you and far beyond you,
and that called you back in the end
to the only road you could follow…
Excerpt from “Santiago”
— David Whyte
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Option #2
“A Spiritual Journey”
And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home.
— Wendell Berry
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Option #3
“Now I Become Myself”
Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before–“
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!
— May Sarton
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Option #4
“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.
— William Stafford
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Option #5
“O Me! O Life!”
Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?
Answer.
That you are here—that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.
− Walt Whitman
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Option #6
“Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.”
― Seamus Heaney
Option #7
Beehive State
by Phillip Watts Brown
Press your ear to any chapel:
members hymn, trembling in the spirit,
vocal chords and the organ vibrating
the walls. Streetlamps outside too
buzz with light and the steeples
cast long shadows. One points toward
my childhood home. I tightrope along
its blue edge, end up where
I started. Wind stirs backyard aspens
into a swarm, fireworks bloom overhead.
Smoke drifts westward like saints seeking
Zion, a rose in the desert.
This faith is a dark handcart
to pull. The embered valley flickers
with cars. I watch their frenzy
from the back porch, a cold drink
sweating in my hand. The AC
shuts off. Crickets shush the silence.
Stillness lifts a loaded frame from
the boxed hive of my heart
heavy with everything unsaid, questions kept
in hexagon closets. Do I leave
the apiary? Shed the protective suit,
gloves, and veil? Make another life?
Blood thrums through my veins, honeyed
with desire. My prayers have reached
a fever-pitch. How will this end?
I stand on the top porch-step,
arms stretched out like a cross
like in a dream I had:
terrified to move, to even breathe,
my tender body clothed in bees.