Always do your writing in the wilderness. - William Stafford

We stood by the library. It was an August night. Priests and sisters of hundreds of unsaid creeds passed us going their separate pondered roads. We watched them cross under the corner light. Freights on the edge of town were carrying away flatcars of steel to be made into secret guns; we knew, being human, that they were enemy guns, and we were somehow vowed to poverty. No one stopped or looked long or held out a hand. They were following orders received from hour to hour, so many signals, all strange, from a foreign power: But tomorrow, you whispered, peace may flow over the land. At that corner in a flash of lightning we two stood; that glimpse we had will stare through the dark forever: on the poorest roads we would be walkers and beggars, toward some deathless meeting involving a crust of bread.

All events and experiences are local, somewhere. And all human enhancements of events and experiences — all the arts — are regional in the sense that they derive from immediate relation to felt life.
It is this immediacy that distinguishes art. And paradoxically the more local the feeling in art, the more all people can share it; for that vivid encounter with the stuff of the world is our common ground.
Artists, knowing this mutual enrichment that extends everywhere, can act, and praise, and criticize, as insiders — the means of art is the life of all people. And that life grows and improves by being shared. Hence, it is good to welcome any region you live in or come to, or think of, for that is where life happens to be, right where you are.

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.