"Christmas" by Annie Dillard

In honor of National Poetry Month, here is "Christmas" by Annie Dillard.


Christmas

Trees that have loved
in silence, kiss,
crashing; the Douglas firs lean
low to the brittle embrace
of a lodgepole pine.

In cities at night
tin canisters eat
their cookies; the bed;
asleep, tossing,
brushes its curtain of bead.

My wristwatch grows
obscurely, sun-
flower big. Across
America, cameras gaze,
astonished, into the glass.

This is the hour
God loosens and empties.
Rushing, consciousness comes
unbidden, gasping,
and memory, wisdom, grace.

Birds come running;
the curtains moan.
Dolls in the hospital
with brains of coral
jerk, breathe and are born.

http://www.anniedillard.com/

Don't Ask Why

I have never understood the people whose "reason" for believeing in "God" and "heaven" is, "Well, otherwise, there would be no meaning to life."

The meaning of life: you, here, now. Nothing else.
Participate in it now--don't wait for an imaginary "heaven" or some mythical reward or a punishment from a father figure hallucination.


"No why. Just here."
-John Cage, Life Magazine's "Why are we here"

"We are here to abet creation and to witness to it, to notice each other's beautiful face and complex nature so that creation need not play to an empty house."
--Annie Dilliard.

"I finally figured out the only reason to be alive is to enjoy it."
--Rita Mae Brown

"But I don't have to know an answer. I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me."
--Richard Feynman

"Uncertainty in the pressure of vivid hopes and fears is painful, but must be endured if we wish to live without the support of comforting fairy tales."
--Bertrand Russell

The Crushing Number

"Do you suffer what...French paleontologist [Pierre Teilhard de Chardin] called 'the distress that makes human wills founder under the crushing number of living things and stars'?"
--Annie Dillard
"And if you don't, you're not paying attention."
--JEF