Sometimes

Sometimes, when a bird cries out,

Or the wind sweeps through a tree,

Or a dog howls in a far off farm,

I hold still and listen a long time.

My soul turns and goes back to the place

Where, a thousand forgotten years ago,

The bird and the blowing wind

Were like me, and were my brothers.

My soul turns into a tree,

And an animal, and a cloud bank.

Then changed and odd it comes home

And asks me questions. What should I reply?

~~ Hermann Hesse ~~

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The River

“I am only a ferryman and it is my task to take people across this river. I

have taken thousands of people across and to all of them my river has

been nothing but a hindrance on their journey. They have travelled for

money and business, to weddings and on pilgrimages; the river has

been in their way and the ferryman was there to take them quickly

across the obstacle. However, amongst the thousands there have been

a few, four or five, to whom the river was not an obstacle. They have

heard its voice and listened to it, and the river has become holy to them,

as it has to me. “Have you also learned that secret from the river; that

there is no such thing as time?” That the river is everywhere at the same

time, at the source and at the mouth, at the waterfall, at the ferry, at the

current, in the ocean and in the mountains, everywhere and that the

present only exists for it, not the shadow of the past nor the shadow of

the future.”

 

~ From ‘Siddhartha’ by Herman Hesse