June 23, 2026

The place where we are right is hard and trampled like a yard.

Amichai wrote this poem in Israel in the late twentieth century, living in a country where everyone around him held their beliefs with fierce certainty, religious and political. He watched people dig into their positions so hard that nothing new could grow. The poem is a quiet argument for loosening your grip — on being right, on knowing, on having it all figured out — and sitting with the discomfort of open ground instead. That argument lands differently when you are alone and still, because stillness is exactly when your certainties start to feel less solid.