The Savage Poem Around Me

"Ghostly, wrapped in its shroud of snow, my island stands white above the blackness of unfreezing waters. What have I done? Although I had lived these days by anticipation, no sooner had the sails of the departing yacht vanished below the water horizon...then I realized at once, and with a strange sinking of the heart...the savage poem around me."

Alfred Lambourne (artist) from his book, Our Inland Sea: The Story of a Homestead
Talking about The Great Salt Lake.  Painting Black, Rock, Great Salt Lake c. 1880

Inside Bickerings

"My heart wants roots. My mind wants wings. I cannot bear their bickerings."

— E. Y. Harburg 

Choose

"Sometimes, making the wrong choice is better than making no choice. You have the courage to go forward, that is rare. A person who stands at the fork, unable to pick, will never get anywhere. "
— Terry Goodkind 

Love

"Love the animals, love the plants, love everything. If you love everything, you will perceive the divine mystery in things. Once you perceive it, you will begin to comprehend it better every day. And you will come at last to love the whole world with an all-embracing love."

-Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

Make of that what you will

"Often I have not known where I was going until I was already there. I have had my share of desires and goals, but my life has come to me or I have gone to it mainly by way of mistakes and surprises. Often I have received better than I deserved. Often my fairest hopes have rested on bad mistakes. I am an ignorant pilgrim, crossing a dark valley. And yet for a long time, looking back, I have been unable to shake off the feeling that I have been led- make of that what you will."

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

There's a guy I know peripherally

"There’s a guy I know. Peripherally. And only a little. But I know him well enough to know that I like to sneak glances of him when I can. And occasionally, when I’m lucky, he does the same. I said something to him not loo long ago. It was a silly something—nothing really. It was boring and not to the point and he looked up at me and grinned—this sort of wide, loose smile. And it struck me that his response was so disproportionate to what I had said, but so perfectly apt for what was happening in that meaty and wordless territory where two people meet. An altogether different sort of silence. A good one. I did that, I thought as he walked away. That smile—I did that. Not because of what I said or what I did but because of who I am. Twenty-eight years and I’d never consciously had that thought before. I can’t help thinking that that’s the sort of smile a girl should walk down the stairs to. A little bit giddy and little bit unrestrained and so totally guileless.

And to accept anything less would be to miss the point."http://www.megfee.com/2014/01/21/paris-explained/#.UuXz8P0QHUQ

-Meg Fee

Why

"I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear."

-Joan Didion