Joy Joy

"Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation."
-Andre Gide

Love has Teeth

"Love isn't soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close."

-Stephen King, The Body

I

"Do you remember the way the girls
would call out "love you!"
conveniently leaving out the "I"
as if they didn't want to commit
to their own declarations.

I agree that the "I" is a pretty heavy concept."

-David Berman, "Self Portrait at 28"

I'm Soft

"I'm soft. It's taken me most of my life to realize this. I've tried to be hard, to make my skin sheets of metal, to build an armor that would tell the rest of the world how strong I am despite what I may feel inside. I tried not to care about things, tried no to feel hurt like it was a virus I couldn't let infect me. I've pushed and pushed away too many people and too many emotions but they all seep back in wham I go to sleep at night. I wake up with boys I wouldn't let touch me on my skin, and feelings of anger at the back of my throat. It seeps in and softens me. And I'm realizing I want to be that softness. That earth. I want to feel everything, and let everyone in. Because I've been cold for too long. My New Year's resolution is to be softer, warmer, lighter."

-Misguided Ghosts

Jump through the fear...

“You’re waiting to not be afraid and that’s never going to happen. If you want this, it’s there for you. But you have to jump through the fear. "

-darlingmagazine.org

Full Force Mistakes

“It’s better to make a mistake with the full force of your being than to timidly avoid mistakes with a trembling spirit. Responsibility means recognizing both pleasure and price, action and consequence, then making a choice." 

— The Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman    

Endings are Beginnings

“There are endings and there are beginnings and the two always meet." 


— 'anew' by Della Hicks-Wilson 

Tell the truth but tell it slant

Tell all the truth but tell it slant,
Success in circuit lies,
Too bright for our infirm delight
The truth's superb surprise;

As lightning to the children eased
With explanation kind,
The truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind. 

Emily Dickinson

LIFE Motto

"To see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to, to draw closer, to see and be amazed."

Life Magazine motto

Crammed

"I sometimes find, and I am sure you know the feeling, that I simply have too many thoughts and memories crammed into my mind."

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire 

Flowing Complexity

"I am profoundly enchanted by the flowing complexity in you."

— John Keats, from a letter to Fanny Brawne dated 5 November 1820

True Story

"Make it all up — but make it up so truly that later it will happen that way."

— Ernest Hemingway, from a letter to F. Scott Fitzgerald

Sundays

"Time flows in a strange way on Sundays."

-Haruki Murakami

Miss

"It’s weird to feel like you miss someone you’re not even sure you know."

▼

  David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest 

Poison Through the Pen

“I could say that being a writer gives me a high need to emotionally process things and find their meaning. I could say that every rotten thing that happens to a writer is still, in its own way, a gift. An inspiration. But I won’t. What I will say is this: being a writer makes me a healthier person. The poison leaves through the pen. I don’t walk around carrying it all day. Whenever I read my work to a room, I give it away.”

- MEGAN FALLEY, INTERVIEWED FOR PETRICHOR REVIEW

Sees Me

“The way he looked at me, all serious and attentive, was more flattering than any compliment I’d ever had. "

— Hester Browne, The Little Lady Agency and the Prince 

Love's Conviction

"Life's greatest happiness is to be convinced we are loved."

-Victor Hugo, Les Mis

Something to Say Festers

"I think maybe the most frustrating feeling in the world is to have something to say but not know how to put it into words. To have lived through something but not be able to get it out of you before it festers."

-?

Authentic Magnetism

"She had authentic magnetism. The way she listened was more eloquent than speech. "
— Laura (1944)

On Rothko

"Rothko was grappling with such deep issues he felt that figures of any kind got in the way of the deeper meaning…therefore, he poured his heart and soul into color balance, brushwork, and dominating one's field of vision."

-Coco James

Tell Them Love

“Opening your heart and being courageous and telling people that you care about them or like them or that you think they’re special only makes you a better, bigger, kinder, softer, more loving person and it only attracts more love into your life. "

— Amy Poehler   

Sometimes People

“Sometimes you meet someone, and it’s so clear that the two of you, on some level belong together. As lovers, or as friends, or as family, or as something entirely different. You just work, whether you understand one another or you’re in love or you’re partners in crime. You meet these people throughout your life, out of nowhere, under the strangest circumstances, and they help you feel alive. I don’t know if that makes me believe in coincidence, or fate, or sheer blind luck, but it definitely makes me believe in something.”

— unknown 

A Thousand Ways

"Let the beauty of what you love be what you do. There are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground, there are a thousand ways to go home again."

Rumi

Meditation

"Duration is not the major concern. One can easily sit still an hour with closed eyes and accomplish nothing. One can as easily give God only an instant, an din that instant join with Him completely. Perhaps the one generalization that can be made is this-as soon as possible after waking, take your quiet time, continuing a minute or two after you begin to find it difficult. You may find that the difficulty will diminish and drop away. If not, that is the time to stop."

-A Course in Miracles

Exactly Wrong

"When you do something exactly wrong, you always turn up something."

-Andy Warhol

Wide Quietness

And in the midst of this wide quietness
A rosy sanctuary will I dress
With the wreath'd trellis of a working brain…

-John Keats, "Ode to Psyche"

Judgement

"The arousing of prejudice, pity, anger, and similar emotions has nothing to do with the essential facts, but is merely a personal appeal to the man who is judging the case."
-Aristotle

Truth Like a Lion

"The truth is like a lion. You don’t have to defend it. Let it loose. It will defend itself." | St. Augustine

Innate Worth

The moment you feel like you have to prove your worth to someone is the moment to absolutely and utterly walk away. | Alysia Harris

Our Hearts

"For our hearts are not pure; our hearts are filled with need and greed as much as with love and grace; and we wrestle with our hearts all the time. The wrestling is who we are. How we wrestle is who we are. What we want to be is never what we are. Not yet. Maybe that’s why we have these relentless engines in our chests, driving us toward what we might be. " | Brian Doyle

Unravel Synonyms

Tahereh Mafi, Unravel Me

Memory has You

"Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you."

- John Irving

Let Go

"You can be as mad as a mad dog at the way things went. You could swear, curse the fates, but when it comes to the end, you have to let go."

— The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Not Drawn Astray

"Let yourself be drawn to the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray."

— Rumi 

Claws

“Everything I’ve ever let go of had claw marks on it." 
— David Foster Wallace

Wait

“Don’t wait to realize you shouldn’t have waited."
— Ofer Moses 

Alone

"I like drinking tea alone, and reading alone.

I like riding the bus alone, and walking home alone.

It gives me time to think, and set my mind free.

I like eating alone, and listening to music alone.

But when I see a mother with her child;

A girl with her lover;

Or a friend laughing with their best friend;

I realize that even though I like being alone

I don’t fancy being lonely."

-unknown

Love and Lessen

“The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things in life like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people in life recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.

For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And lessen the suffering of others. You'd be surprised how far that gets you.”

-- Neil deGrasse Tyson (reddit, 2012)

Thin Lines

"The line between happy and crazy is very thin. The distance between joy and depression is fragile."
-Sarah Kathleen Peck

Harmony

"Harmony makes small things grow, lack of it makes great things decay."
-Sallust

You are the water

❝

Stop trying to be a bridge
when you
are the water
rushing beneath it."

— Kelsey Danielle

Hands

❝

When I sit near you, my hands suddenly become alien things and I don’t know where to put them or what they usually do, like this is the first time I’ve ever had hands and maybe they go in my pockets and maybe they don’t."

— Iain S. Thomas, I Wrote This For You

Life After Death

❝

Each time you open a book and read it,
A tree smiles knowing there’s life after death."

— Unknown

A Diary of Colors

My second grade teacher liked to ask us,
“How do you feel today, on a scale of one to ten?”
Ten always meant I’m super, thank you
and one was always not today, Mrs. MacAuley, not today.
But I never liked numbers, they would always
twist and rebel against my mind so I chose
to speak in colors instead.

January third - I am the color
of mint chocolate chip ice cream
but I’ve eaten all the chocolate chips.
I am calm.

February seventh - I am a bruise of
blues and violets today. I think it would
be best if I sat by the window.
These are unhappy colors.

April eleventh - I am turquoise, I am magenta,
I am every color in the rainbow.

April thirtieth - I am gray, I am silent.

May first - I am orange, the color of melting
creamsicles on a beach in July.

June twelfth - I am as yellow as the school bus
that will bring me home to summer. I am free.

Twelve years later, I still use colors.
The winter makes me feel cobalt blue, the ocean
turns me a seafoam green. Violets and purples
leave me uneasy and scarlet is a fever of fury.
Some nights I drown in shades of navy, denim,
and cornflower but other nights I meditate in forests of
harlequin and shamrock.

But you,
you leave me a blinding white followed by a soft yellow:
the color of sunlight after a period of darkness.

— Kelsey Danielle, “A Diary of Colors” 

Meaningless scenes stitched together

“And once you live a good story, you get a taste for a kind of meaning in life, and you can't go back to being normal; you can't go back to meaningless scenes stitched together by the forgettable thread of wasted time.”

― Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years: What I Learned While Editing My Life

Viral

Romance isn’t measured by how viral your proposal goes. The internet age may try to sell you something different, but don’t ever forget that viral is closely associated with sickness – so don’t ever make being viral your goal.

Your goal is always to make your Christ-focus contagious – to just one person.

-a holy experience

Secret Love

"Isn’t it strange? There are so many people out there who secretly love someone. And there are so many people out there who have no idea that someone secretly loves them."

— Letters to Crushes #513739  

Sunrise Sunset

"Everyone should smile. Life really isn’t that serious. We make it hard. The sun rises. The sun sets. We just tend to complicate the process."

— Arian Foster 

On Sadness

"Sometimes we get sad about things and we don’t like to tell other people that we are sad about them. We like to keep it a secret. Or sometimes, we are sad but we really don’t know why we are sad, so we say we aren’t sad but we really are."

— Mark Haddon, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Fat

"Is fat really the worst thing a human being can be? Is fat worse than vindictive, jealous, shallow, vain, boring, evil, or cruel? Not to me."

— J. K. Rowling

Message in the Mess

"Those with a grateful mindset tend to see the message in the mess. And even though life may knock them down, the grateful find reasons, if even small ones, to get up."

— Steve Maraboli, Life, the Truth, and Being Free

Weight of my eyes

"In your glance away
feel the weight of my eyes to
your distraction"

-Tyler Knott Gregson

Shining Armour for Protection

"What is attractive in you is not you. It is your absolutely radiant body. That is the shining armor around you for protection and attraction both. And its strength depends on how deeply you consume prana and how many times during the day you try to breathe absolutely mechanically [consciously]."

-Yogi Bhajan

Let's just call it sunrise...

Come the white morning
I'll cross the earth on my face,

let the barrel of light tip over one more time

and let's just call it sunrise.
I don't know anything

about blowing a child out
like a balloon, or what comes after-

that dream like a waterfall sealed in a flask
close to God's hip

-John Rybicki from "Tender Range"

Trust Them

"The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them." 
-Ernest Hemingway

Ya - what he said

"To hell with being ashamed of what you liked. "

- Invisible Man

Able to Breathe

"Only a shipwrecked person who has just escaped drowning could understand the psychology of someone who breaks out in laughter just because he is able to breathe."


-Kōbō Abe, The Woman in the Dunes

Staring at the Sky

…you can look at something, close your eyes, and see it again and still know nothing – like staring at the sky to figure out the distances between stars.

     -Ann Beattie, Jacklighting

The Red Thread

“An invisible red thread connects those who are destined to meet, regardless of time, place, or circumstances. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it will never break.”

-Ancient Chinese Proverb 

Power Boat

"We’re all sinking in the same boat here. We’re all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We’re all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves."

— Susanne Colasanti, Waiting For You 

Book Validation

"Of course anyone who truly loves books buys more of them than he or she can hope to read in one fleeting lifetime. A good book, resting unopened in its slot on a shelf, full of majestic potentiality, is the most comforting sort of intellectual wallpaper."

— David Quammen

Start Going

"I think that one of these days you’re going to have to find out where you want to go. And then you’ve got to start going there."

— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (

Only in the Bones

“I am always trying to convey something that can’t be conveyed, to explain something which is inexplicable, to tell about something I have in my bones, something which can be expressed only in the bones." 
— Franz Kafka 

The Violence of Articulation by Meg Fee

"I just keep thinking about that dinner table. The smooth green of the glass. The accumulation of dirty dishes and empty bottles. How startlingly sober I felt as I sat there. How his body was turned in, facing another woman. How in the end there were only four of us and how very much I felt apart. How when this other girl told a joke he laughed in a way that he only ever, upon occasion, laughed for me. And how when that happened I sort of caught my breath and thought, oh, well, there’s that.

---------------------------------------------

The violence of articulation. I had a teacher in school who used that phrase and I’ll never forget it. The violence. Of. Articulation. How nearly impossible it is to say some things out loud. How catapulting them out of the mouth is part pyrotechnics, part gymnastics, and one hell of a leap of faith. And how some words, no matter how they are said, leave cuts and stains and scratch the mouth.

But I’ve been choking on I-don’t-knows for nearly a month now, so you pick your battles.

Why is it easier to say the cruel things? Why do those words slip out, slick as oil, so tremendously seductive and so incredibly damaging? It’s so hard to speak from a place of generosity. To say, I am sad and I am hurt, and this can’t go on, but I am nonetheless in awe of you. To say you deserve my respect—my kindness, even as I am so completely and maddeningly frustrated with you—hurt by you.

Because the thing is, it’s not just about the words and the difficulty of getting them out—it’s about figuring out where truth and generosity meet. It’s about speaking from the largest part of yourself—that part that continuously reaches for a bigger life, that says I want more and if you can’t give it to me, I forgive you that—not your fault, but time to go. That part willing to risk a little bit of lonely. That part that makes a practice of faith and thinks well hell if I’m not lucky that I get to feel this, hard as it is. That part that goes to the edge of the cliff again and again and again.

---------------------------------------------------------------

He wasn’t the right guy. For me. He wasn’t the right guy, for me. And he certainly never looked at me like I was the right girl for him. And I am a girl who wants to be looked at like that."

-Meg Feemegfee.com

Daily Bread

"Books are both our luxuries and our daily bread."

— Henry Stevens

Fighting

"I’ll fight for you, but I will not compete for you."

— Unknown

On Waiting

"We’re all sinking in the same boat here. We’re all bored and desperate and waiting for something to happen. Waiting for life to get better. Waiting for things to change. Waiting for that one person to finally notice us. We’re all waiting. But we also need to realize that we all have the power to make those changes for ourselves."

— Susanne Colasanti, Waiting For You

Someone to Hold Me

"Stories: the only thing we've got, the arbiters of this human process of rocketing between hope and despair, and it's why every person is vitally important. It's why it doesn't matter if you're a mess, or put together, or even a success according to arbitrary standards; what matters is that you are conscious of the world around you, in all of its terrible beauty."

-Emily Rapp, Someone to Hold Me

How You Survived

"I don't want to hear about the mess because we al know what that looks like. I want to know how you survived."

- Amanda de Cadenet of The Conversation

Safety

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but pouring them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness blow the rest away. 
— George Eliot  

Fog of Hope

Tell me what’s the difference

between hope and waiting.

Because my heart doesn’t know.

It constantly cuts itself on the glass of waiting;

It constantly gets lost in the fog of hope.

— Anna Kamienska, from A Nest Of Quiet 

Still Dear to Him

“She longed to know what at that moment was passing in his mind; in what manner he thought of her, and whether, in defiance of everything, she was still dear to him." 
— Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

Your Dream

"Only the dreamer knows the dream."
-Carl Jung

Instrument

"Enjoy your body, use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it, or what other people think of it, it’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own."

— Kurt Vonnegut

Rest is not idleness

Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass under trees on a summer’s day, listening to the murmur of the water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is by no means a waste of time.

— Sir John Lubbock 

So What

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, So what. That’s one of my favorite things to say. So what.

— Andy Warhol

Present

When you are washing the dishes, washing the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life. Drink your tea slowly and reverently, as if it is the axis on which the whole world revolves—slowly, evenly, without rushing toward the future. Live the actual moment. Only this actual moment is life.

— Thich Nhat Hanh 

Smart Girls

"Smart girls are the overthinkers, the insecure ones, the different ones. They know what the real world is like. They analyze every little thing in life. Why? To avoid getting hurt. To find happiness. They stay up at night trying to think about every possible situation to get through all the problems. They think too much. They trust fewer people. Their insecurity proves their respect toward themselves. Of course they try to live away from a drama-filled life. Smart girls know their worth. Now those are the ones worth keeping by your side."

▼

  

Unknown

Haunted

"YOU’RE ALWAYS HAUNTED BY THE IDEA YOU’RE WASTING YOUR LIFE."

-Chuck Palahniuk, “Diary”

So you want to be a writer?

by Charles Bukowski
if it doesn't come bursting out of you in spite of everything, don't do it. unless it comes unasked out of your heart and your mind and your mouth and your gut, don't do it. if you have to sit for hours staring at your computer screen or hunched over your typewriter searching for words, don't do it. if you're doing it for money or fame, don't do it. if you're doing it because you want women in your bed, don't do it. if you have to sit there and rewrite it again and again, don't do it. if it's hard work just thinking about doing it, don't do it. if you're trying to write like somebody else, forget about it. if you have to wait for it to roar out of you, then wait patiently. if it never does roar out of you, do something else. if you first have to read it to your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or your parents or to anybody at all, you're not ready. don't be like so many writers, don't be like so many thousands of people who call themselves writers, don't be dull and boring and pretentious, don't be consumed with self- love. the libraries of the world have yawned themselves to sleep over your kind. don't add to that. don't do it. unless it comes out of your soul like a rocket, unless being still would drive you to madness or suicide or murder, don't do it. unless the sun inside you is burning your gut, don't do it. when it is truly time, and if you have been chosen, it will do it by itself and it will keep on doing it until you die or it dies in you. there is no other way. and there never was.

Glimpse

We want the spring to come and the winter to pass.
We want whoever to call or not call,
A letter, a kiss-
We want more and more
And then more of it

But there are moments,
Walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the
Window glass,
Say, the window of the corner video store,
And I'm gripped by a cherishing
So deep for my own blowing hair,
Chapped face, and unbuttoned coat
That I'm speechless:

I am living...


-Marie Howe

Hard

"Everything is hard until it is easy."
-Goethe

Crazy Magic

"Everyone wants some magical solution for their problem and everyone refuses to believe in magic."
 - The Mad Hatter

Kiss and Travel

"Reading about traveling is like kissing through a screen door." - Glenn Rawson

Let Go

Dear Peter, I am finding in life that as we let go, the spirit takes over more. I am learning to trust and the key is SO simple. Never let yourself feel fear. Always feel love, it's that easy. Each day if I want to feel any negative emotions I realize that that will keep my body from healing and that the only way to heal is to trust and to feel love. I wake up and think, death or happiness my only two choices :) I am learning to become VERY happy and realizing all of us can make this choice every single day. If there is any worry in your heart just let it go and dwell in a space of happiness and love. That's the space where all the miracles happen. You are being watched and attended by a ton of angels and by Christ so just enjoy! No worries, be happy."

-A letter to Peter, a missionary, from his violin teacher, Natalie Reed

Memory

"Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you."

- John Irving

Grace and Gravity

Stevie Lorann. 20. LA.

Grace and Gravity

"The soul has moments of Escape
When bursting all the doors
She dances like a Bomb, abroad,
And swings upon the Hours.
As do the Bee -- delirious borne
Long Dungeoned from his Rose
Touch Liberty -- then know no more,
But Noon, and Paradise"

Find My Barriers

“Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” - Rumi   from Blue - to me.  

Branches

“If what I say resonates with you, it is merely because we are both branches of the same tree.” ― WB Yeats

Optimism

"The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser — in case you thought optimism was dead."

▼

  Robert Brault 

You are not a tree

“If you don’t like where you are, move on. You are not a tree."
 
— Unknown 

Antidote

"Action is the antidote to despair."

-Joan Baez

Attachment and Faith

"So it isn’t just that she looked back; she looked back longingly. In short, her attachment to the past outweighed her confidence in the future. That, apparently, was at least part of her sin...I plead with you not to dwell on days now gone, nor to yearn vainly for yesterdays, however good those yesterdays may have been...we remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives. So a more theological way to talk about Lot’s wife is to say that she did not have faith. She doubted the Lord’s ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently she thought—fatally, as it turned out—that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind." 

 -Elder Holland 2009 referring to Lot's wife  

Never Too Late

"For what it's worth: it's never too late or, in my case, too early to be whoever you want to be. There's no time limit, stop whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. If you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again. " - Benjamin Button

Been There

"Deep inside, she knew who she was, and that person was smart and kind and often even funny, but somehow her personality always got lost somewhere between her heart and her mouth, and she found herself saying the wrong thing or, more often, nothing at all."

— Julia Quinn

Black and White

"Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which peolpe our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict. In the zone where black and white clash."

- Louis Aragon

I would keep them all

"I wish friends and lovers still wrote letters to each other, poetry to each other, or recorded their thoughts in the form of small, tangible gifts. There is nothing lovelier than receiving the innermost thoughts of another person in their handwriting, their words smeared with the side of their palm or looped in cursive ink so that they all run together. I would keep them all."

-Arosary

Live it

"Don’t wait around for others to experience life with you. Take the lead, go out, and get the most out of life. Eventually, you’ll have more company than you can handle."

— Gentlemen’s Wisdom

Your Story

"If you ever find yourself in the wrong story, leave."

— Mo Willems 

True Beauty

“You are the only person who is in charge of how you feel about yourself. Nobody else can possibly do that. You get to decide if you believe you are beautiful or not, and nobody can take it away from you. If someone suggests that you aren’t beautiful, you can consider how sad it is that they have such a limited view of beauty. You can consider how unfortunate it is that they have such an exaggerated sense of self-importance that they think you should care about what they think. You can also choose to realize that it has nothing at all to do with your beauty and everything to do with their limitations.”

— Ragen Chastain 

Comfort Zone

“Sometimes being uncomfortable is the only way to save yourself from settling. 
— Andrea Ager

Terrifying Amazing

“If it’s both terrifying and amazing then you should definitely pursue it. "
— Erada 

Love Emily

“Emerging from an Abyss, and re-entering it—that is Life, is it not, Dear?”

- Emily Dickinson, from a letter to Susan Gilbert Dickinson, late 1885

Origins

“Who can guess the luna’s sadness who lives so briefly? Who can guess the impatience of stone longing to be ground down, to be part again of something livelier? Who can imagine in what heaviness the rivers remember the original clarity?”

- Mary Oliver, opening to “The Moth, The Mountains, The Rivers," from A ThousandMornings: Poems

Sea Everyone Anyone No one

“To live in an old shack by the sea 
(And breathe the sweet salt air) 
To live with the dawn and the dusk 
The new moon and the full moon 
The tides the wind and the rain… 
To surf and comb the beach 
And gather sea shells and drift-wood 
And know the thrill of loneliness 
And lose all sense of time 
And be free

To hike over the island to the village 
And visit the marketplace 
And enjoy the music and the food and the people 
And do a little trading 
And see the great ships come and go 
And, man, have me a ball

And in the evening 
(When the sky is on fire) 
Heaven and earth become my great open cathedral 
Where all men are brothers 
Where all things are bound by law 
And crowned with love 
Poor, alone and happy 
I walk by the surf and make a fire on the beach 
And as darkness covers the face of the deep 
Lie down in the wild grass 
And dream the dream that the dreamers dream

I am the wind, the sea, the evening star 
I am everyone, anyone, no one.”

- Eden Ahbez 

Inception

"If the dream is a translation of waking life, waking life is also a translation of the dream." - Rene Magritte 

Love Letter

Goodnight and great love to you. We see the same stars

— George Mallory to his wife Ruth in a letter during the 1921 Everest Reconnaissance Expedition

Rivers down their faces

"It amazes me what humans can do, even when streams are flowing down their faces, and they stagger on."

▼

  The Book Thief- Markus Zusak 

More Faith

by meg fee

and others may live their lives “better–but not with my peculiar flavor and music.” this is my lot and i’ll be damned if i don’t figure it out. and frankly i’d like to see how it all plays out. which is to say, i’m invested in the story. i’m invested in the story of my own life. which, i think, is not a bad place to be at twenty-seven.

i used to think the not knowing was the worst bit. the great gaping unknown–an endlessly terrifying thing. but i’m starting to realize it’s actually quite thrilling. it’s actually, absolutely, the best bit. there is so much to look forward to, so much still to do. i have yet to live that night on which i’ll meet the man i marry. yet to get my first piece published. yet to give birth or buy a house or figure out non-oblique answers to all those damn questions. there are so many firsts still ahead of me. and what a blessing–what a particularly exciting thing about standing on this side of that invisible line.

what i’m just now coming to realize is that the difference between the terror and the thrill–that razor-edge that separates the two, is faith.

i remember sending up a particularly vociferous prayer towards the start of the year, which wasn’t so much a prayer as a demand, what do you want from me? what do you want from me? six words i said again and again. six words i angrily flung upward. and the answer came back immediate and clear: more faith.

more faith.

which at the time i thought meant more patience, and patience has never been my virtue.

but now, these many months later, i don’t think it is patience. it’s not about more patience or less patience. it’s about a seed of self-belief. and how that seed is actually a divine thing. it’s about embracing the bits that don’t make any sense. trusting that the story is in fact made by the departures and aberrations. it’s about wonder and curiosity. about moving forward and upward even if the movement is a sort of graceless thrashing about. it’s about clawing and clamoring and dirt beneath the fingernails. it’s about saying i don’t know. and i don’t know. and i don’t know, again. because one day i will. and if one believes that in the end it’ll all work out–even and most especially in the face of overwhelming doubt–than those moments of discomfort and unease and fear are made sweet and holy and wholly lovely by their impermanence.

more faith.

hell.

English Degree

I hope when people ask what you’re going to do with your English and/or creative writing degree you’ll say: Continue my bookish examination of the contradictions and complexities of human motivation and desire; or maybe just: Carry it with me, as I do everything that matters. And then smile very serenely until they say oh.

Yours,
Sugar (Cheryl Strayed)

Ancient Heart

“The future has an ancient heart.”  - Carlo Levi

Clearing

Clearing by Martha Postlewaite

Do not try to save
the whole world
or do anything grandiose.
Instead, create
a clearing
in the dense forest
of your life
and wait there
patiently.
until the song
that is your life
falls into your own cupped hands and you
recognize and greet it.
Only then will you know how to give yourself
to this world
so worth of rescue.

Infinitives

"To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget."

 — ― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living 

Hands

"I find strength in hands. Like words, they have the power to build someone up or completely tear them apart. Just think of all the things you do with your hands every day; all the enjoyable or mundane tasks you need your hands for. There are so many great feelings associated with hands. Imagine these sensations -  kneading dough, a pen firmly grasped writing furiously, your hands running through someone’s hair, fingertips dancing across piano keys, reaching out and intertwining hands with a loved one.  Thinking about all the actions hands can perform is inspiring.

Hands tell a story. They have the ability to reveal such intimate parts of a person, if others took the time to notice. Whether your hands are callused, perfectly manicured , scared, adorned with jewels, or covered in dirt, they are speaking to the world. "

-Modern Hepburn

Truth

"Things didn’t work out because, well, greater things were in the works. It’s so difficult while we’re blind and hurting and don’t know which way is up. But, if you have faith in anything, have faith in the fact that the universe has a beautiful way of straightening things out far better than we ever could. You may not see it today or tomorrow, but you will look back in a few years and be absolutely perplexed and awed by how every little thing added up and brought you somewhere wonderful– or where you always wanted to be. You will be grateful that things didn’t work out the way you once wanted them to."
 — What Happens After What Was “Supposed To Be” 

Chocolate Cake

"He showed the words ‘chocolate cake’ to a group of Americans and recorded their word associations. “Guilt” was the top response. If that strikes you as unexceptional, consider the response of French eaters to the same prompt: ‘celebration.’" — Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto