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“Summer Story”
When the hummingbird
sinks its face
into the trumpet vine,
into the funnels
of the blossoms
and the tongue
leaps out
and throbs,
I am scorched
to realize once again
how many small, available things
are in this world
that aren’t
pieces of gold
or power-------
that nobody owns
or could but even
for a hillside of money-----
that just float
in the world,
or drift over the fields,
or into the gardens,
and into the tents of the vines,
and now here I am
spending my time,
as the saying goes,
watching until the watching turns into feeling,
so that I feel I am myself
a small bird with a terrible hunger,
with a thin beak probing and dipping
and a heart that races so fast
it is only a heart beat ahead of breaking------
and I am the hunger and the assuagement,
and also I am the leaves and the blossoms,
and, like them, I am full of delight, and shaking.
-- Mary Oliver
In common parlance, among the many who have not experienced ecstasy, ecstasy is fun, and I am frequently asked why I do not reach for mushrooms every night. But ecstasy is not fun. Your very soul is seized and shaken until it tingles…The unknowing vulgar abuse the word, and we must recapture its full and terrifying sense.
-- Albert Hoffman (the creator of LSD)
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