Touchstone.

For my "keystone" passage, that I often find myself coming back to is a little poem by Robert Frost called Desert Places from a collection of works known as "A Further Range."

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it--it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less--
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars--on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Mostly it is the last stanza that interests me. It means a lot to me because it holds tight to many of my personal thoughts, of the divine and the common, the intrinsic and extrinsic, internal and external, inner-human thought and capacity versus the outer possibilities of the stars. It both marvels and recoils at the ambivalent duality of nature, the apparent horror and ecstasy of nature as it occurs in the world (Earth) and eventually muses the stars themselves for inspiration. The poem has a tone of both admiration and discomfort towards the solitude and isolated state of nature, and finally sets the gaze of the poet inwards, reflecting that for all the wonder and unpleasantness of nature external, the inner workings of the human mind will always be the more complex and worrisome.