How blue is the sea, how blue is the sky, how blue and tiny and redeemable everything is, even you, even your eyes, even your imagination. - Mary Oliver

In creative work — creative work of all kinds — those who are the world's working artists are not trying to help the world go around, but forward.

When I have to die, I would like to die
on a day of rain -
long rain, slow rain, the kind you think will never end.

SPRING Somewhere a black bear has just risen from sleep and is staring down the mountain. All night in the brisk and shallow restlessness of early spring I think of her, her four black fists flicking the gravel, her tongue like a red fire touching the grass, the cold water. There is only one question: how to love this world. I think of her rising like a black and leafy ledge to sharpen her claws against the silence of the trees. Whatever else my life is with its poems and its music and its glass cities, it is also this dazzling darkness coming down the mountain, breathing and tasting; all day I think of her — her white teeth, her wordlessness, her perfect love.