Accept the universeAs the gods gave it to you.If the gods wanted to give you something elseThey’d have done it.If there are other matters and other worldsThere are.

Also at times, on the surface of streams,Water?bubbles formAnd grow and burstAnd have no meaning at allExcept that they’re water?bubblesGrowing and bursting.

All the evil in the world comes from us bothering with each other,Wanting to do good, wanting to do evil.Our soul and the sky and the earth are enough for us.To want more is to lose this, and be unhappy.

I don’t know what understanding myself is. I don’t look inside.I don’t believe I exist behind myself.

It’s stranger than every strangenessAnd the dreams of all the poetsAnd the thoughts of all the philosophers,That things are really what they seem to beAnd there’s nothing to understand.

I think about this, not like someone thinking, but like someone breathing,And I look at flowers and I smile...I don’t know if they understand meOr if I understand them,But I know the truth is in them and in meAnd in our common divinityOf letting ourselves go and live on the EarthAnd carrying us in our arms through the contented SeasonsAnd letting the wind sing us to sleepAnd not have dreams in our sleep.

And I find a happiness in the fact of accepting —In the sublimely scientific and difficult fact of accepting the inevitable natural.

If I die very young, hear this:I was never anything but a kid playing.I was a heathen like the sun and the water,I had the universal religion only people don’t have.I was happy because I didn’t ask for anything at all,Or tried to find anything,And I didn’t find any more explanationThan the word explanation having no meaning at all.

Night doesn’t fall for my eyesBut my idea of the night is that it falls for my eyes.Beyond my thinking and having any thoughtsThe night falls concretelyAnd the shining of stars exists like it had weight.