...And that is where the joy came in.

Incurable and unbelieving
in any truth but the truth of grieving

I saw a tree inside a tree
rise kaleidoscopically

as if the leaves had livelier ghosts.
I pressed my face as close

to the pane as I could get
to watch that fitful, fluent spirit

that seemed a single being undefined
or countless beings of one mind

haul its strange cohesion
beyond the limits of my vision

over the house heavenwards.
Of course I knew those leaves were birds.

Of course that old tree stood
exactly as it had and would

(but why should it seem fuller now?)
and though a man's mind might endow

even a tree with some excess
of life to which a man seems witness,

that life is not the life of men.
And that is where the joy came in.

-Christian Wiman

Christian Wiman on Ambition

Christian Wiman is a very thoughtful and introspective Christian author. I am really enjoying his book My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer. This quote struck me, especially the last couple of sentences. 

"I once believed in some notion of pure ambition, which I defined as an ambition for the work rather than oneself. But now? If a poet's ambition were truly for the work and nothing else, he would write under a pseudonym, which would not only preserve that pure space of making but free him from the distractions of trying to forge a name for himself in the world. No, all ambition has the reek of disease about it, the relentless smell of the self - except for that terrible, blissful feeling at the heart of creation itself, when all thought of your name is obliterated and all you want is the poem, to be the means wherein something of reality, perhaps even something of eternity, realizes itself. That is noble ambition. But all that comes after - the need for approval, publication, self-promotion - isn't this what usually goes under the name of "ambition"? The effort is to make ourselves more real to ourselves, to feel that we have selves, though the deepest moments of creation tell us that, in some fundamental way, we don't (souls are what those moments reveal, which are both inside and outside, both us and other.) so long as your ambition is to stamp your existence upon existence, your nature on nature, then your ambition is corrupt and you are pursuing a ghost.