Im Memoriam: Robert Heffernan

Pablo, He wandered barefoot to feel the sand across time with a cigarette like someone on his way to catch a bus i first saw him in a sari sitting on a boulder with the light behind him like a halo watching the masses pass beneath him with their packs along a trail in Allegheny Forest in single file. The hand that held his smoke resting casually so it touched the ground like Buddha "my debt is paid" The sun was warm, so I laid down my bundle and sat beside him the conversation followed the moon and swayed like the tide it had no beginning or end first silent, then set to music, then silent again or over coffee and laughter or sad nods and regret still it continues somewhere he is still lost in Amsterdam 7 days late for his plane.

Poems on Nature and Solitude.

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think... you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

--Emerson, the oversoul

"...our life might be much easier and simpler than we make it; that the world might be a happier place than it is; that there is no need of struggles, convulsions, and despairs, of the wringing of the hands and the gnashing of the teeth;...Nature will not have us fret and fume. She does not like our benevolence or our learning much better than she likes our frauds and wars. ..We pain ourselves to please nobody. There are natural ways of arriving at the same ends at which these aim, but do not arrive...Let us draw a lesson from nature, which always works by short ways. When the fruit is ripe, it falls.

Emerson, Self Reliance

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”

― Henry David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods

When I heard the Learn’d Astronomer 
by Walt Whitman

WHEN I heard the learn’d astronomer;
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;
When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;
When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;
Till rising and gliding out, I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

668

"Nature" is what we see—
The Hill—the Afternoon—
Squirrel—Eclipse— the Bumble bee—
Nay—Nature is Heaven—
Nature is what we hear—
The Bobolink—the Sea—
Thunder—the Cricket—
Nay—Nature is Harmony—
Nature is what we know—
Yet have no art to say—
So impotent Our Wisdom is
To her Simplicity.

Emily Dickinson