and learn how by his own thought to derive benefit from his illnesses.
- Hippocrates
Every Sickness is a Chance for Deepening
Fate is not late,
Nor the speech rewritten,
Nor one word forgotten,
Said at the start
About heart,
By heart, for heart.
- W. H. Auden
You Take Each Moment as It Comes
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
- Theodore Roethke
The Pauses in the Everyday Habits of Life Can Contain Mysteries and Illuminations
You and I
Are suddenly what the trees try
To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.
- John Ashbery
You Become Aware of Your Own Body
Inside the veins there are navies setting forth,
Tiny explosions at the water lines,
And seagulls weaving in the wind of the salty blood.
- Robert Bly
You Learn the Patience That Enables Healing
A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. WIth luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of Fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content
Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
- Sylvia Plath
Every Sickness is a Chance for Deepening
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.
This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.
It begins, it has an end,
this is what you will
come back to, this is your hand.
- Margaret Atwood
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The graphics for the web set were designed from a painting by Tony Wright, which was published as an illustration for St. Francis of Assisi's "The Hymn of the Sun." The main image is copyright 1990 by Tony Wright. The detail work is substantially changed by me, for use as background tiles, guestbook graphic, and bar. The part of St. Francis' hymn that the painting is meant to illustrate says,
"Be thou praised, O Lord, for our Sister Mother Earth
Who doth nourish us and ruleth over us,
And bringeth forth diverse fruit,
And bright flowers and herbs."