Posting is now being resumed, but because of continuing holiday festivities, content will be more haphazard than usual. This blog's regular format will return next week.

For today, here is a quote from Seamus Heaney, from an interview published in the Poetry, December 2008 issue. It voices quite well why my interest in poetry has increased substantially over the past year, and what Five Branch Tree's readers can expect more of in 2009. Consider it a resolution:

When you're truly absorbed, everything else is forgotten--you aren't asking "How well am I behaving?" or whatever. What is important for the doer is the quality of attention, the "habits of meditation" Wordsworth spoke about... Wordsworth says, "I believe that my habits of meditation have so formed by feelings, as that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose." That would be my feeling: agonizing over those things-- how to live properly, I mean-- is worthwhile because it forms your "habits of meditation," your frame of mind, your disposition, your temperament. When it comes to the actual doing, all you really have is your temperament, your disposition, your impulse. But you can affect your temperament by thinking in certain ways.