“What’s the worst possible thing you can call a woman? Don’t hold back, now.
You’re probably thinking of words like slut, whore, bitch, cunt (I told you not to hold back!), skank.
Okay, now, what are the worst things you can call a guy? Fag, girl, bitch, pussy. I’ve even heard the term “mangina.”
Notice anything? The worst thing you can call a girl is a girl. The worst thing you can call a guy is a girl. Being a woman is the ultimate insult. Now tell me that’s not royally fucked up.”

~ Jessica Valenti

...beauty you experience actually comes from within

One final reminder: remember that the beauty you experience actually comes from within, it is inseparable from who you are. The stronger, more beautiful the object beheld, the stronger, more beautiful the beholder. Somebody or something may disappoint you, but the source of the beauty remains.


~ Letter from a friend

What is the problem you want to have?

“We’re all seeking that special person who is right for us. But if you’ve been through enough relationships, you begin to suspect there’s no right person, just different flavors of wrong. Why is this? Because you yourself are wrong in some way, and you seek out partners who are wrong in some complementary way. But it takes a lot of living to grow fully into your own wrongness. And it isn’t until you finally run up against your deepest demons, your unsolvable problems—the ones that make you truly who you are—that we’re ready to find a lifelong mate. Only then do you finally know what you’re looking for. You’re looking for the wrong person. But not just any wrong person: the right wrong person—someone you lovingly gaze upon and think, “This is the problem I want to have.”

I will find that special person who is wrong for me in just the right way.

Let our scars fall in love.” 

~ Galway Kinnell

Fulfillment

...we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment.


“When we're incomplete, we're always searching for somebody to complete us. When, after a few years or a few months of a relationship, we find that we're still unfulfilled, we blame our partners and take up with somebody more promising. This can go on and on -- series polygamy -- until we admit that while a partner can add sweet dimensions to our lives, we, each of us, are responsible for our own fulfillment. Nobody else can provide it for us, and to believe otherwise is to delude ourselves dangerously and to program for eventual failure every relationship we enter.”


~Tom Robbins

Wanting badly to save us...

Mules

BY JANE SPRINGER

When they told us Don’t speak until spoken to, we grew
ears the size of corn.

When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed
their hurt whole.

When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted
doors that opened behind curtains.

For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to
save us—not knowing how.

& all the while we found love in unlikely places: In
the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces,

refracted in their long faces.

Advice on Dating Girls

"You should date a girl who reads.
Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve.

Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn.

She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book.

Buy her another cup of coffee.

Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or if she would like to be Alice.

It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does.

She has to give it a shot somehow.

Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world.

Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two.

Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series.

If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are.

You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype.

You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots.

Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.

Or better yet, date a girl who writes." 

— Rosemarie Urquico

... life is perhaps about listening

‎"You never found your place in the world. You pass through the fringes, the periphery of so many lives. Never crossing that line into the sanctum sanctorum, the place where the God resides. Your offerings, left outside the door, unnoticed."

~ http://whilethereisstilltime.blogspot.com/2012/09/luminoso-luminously.html


And now you've resigned yourself to the waves of time... You offered every part of you that was giveable...maybe part of living a life is finding how things seem to work but dont really. How life is perhaps about listening...not to the screeching of your own heart, but the beseeching of people that love you dearly.

For once -
Perhaps it is wise to let things be.
Perhaps it will bring you peace.
Perhaps this is the road littered with goosebumps that forever elude you.
Perhaps you've been fighting a false battle all along.

Sit back and watch the show!


'The universe, gravitated
Maestoso,
Into a simple symphony of strings.'

~ Majesty of Music

Making beauty

'Outside the youth center, between the liquor store
and the police station,
a little dogwood tree is losing its mind;

overflowing with blossomfoam,
like a sudsy mug of beer;
like a bride ripping off her clothes,

dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds,

so Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
It’s been doing that all week:
making beauty,
and throwing it away,
and making more.'

~ Tony Hoagland

from A Color of the Sky.

What can I hold you with?

by Jorge Luis Borges

I offer you lean streets, desperate sunsets, the
moon of the jagged suburbs.
I offer you the bitterness of a man who has looked
long and long at the lonely moon.

I offer you my ancestors, my dead men, the ghosts
that living men have honoured in bronze:
my father's father killed in the frontier of
Buenos Aires, two bullets through his lungs,

bearded and dead, wrapped by his soldiers in
the hide of a cow; my mother's grandfather
--just twentyfour-- heading a charge of
three hundred men in Peru, now ghosts on
vanished horses.

I offer you whatever insight my books may hold,
whatever manliness or humour my life.
I offer you the loyalty of a man who has never
been loyal.

I offer you that kernel of myself that I have saved,
somehow --the central heart that deals not
in words, traffics not with dreams, and is
untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.

I offer you the memory of a yellow rose seen at
sunset, years before you were born.
I offer you explanations of yourself, theories about
yourself, authentic and surprising news of
yourself.

I can give you my loneliness, my darkness, the
hunger of my heart; I am trying to bribe you
with uncertainty, with danger, with defeat.

Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out

BY RICHARD SIKEN

Every morning the maple leaves.

                               Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts

            from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big

and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out

                                             You will be alone always and then you will die.

So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog

         of non-definitive acts,

something other than the desperation.

                   Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I couldn’t come to your party.

Dear So-and-So, I’m sorry I came to your party

         and seduced you

and left you bruised and ruined, you poor sad thing.

                                                         You want a better story. Who wouldn’t?

A forest, then. Beautiful trees. And a lady singing.

                  Love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on.

What a sweet lady. Sing lady, sing! Of course, she wakes the dragon.

            Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly

                                                                                               flames everywhere.

I can tell already you think I’m the dragon,

                that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon.

I’m not the princess either.

                           Who am I? I’m just a writer. I write things down.

I walk through your dreams and invent the future. Sure,

               I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow

         glass, but that comes later.

                                                            And the part where I push you

flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks,

            shut up

I’m getting to it.

                                    For a while I thought I was the dragon.

I guess I can tell you that now. And, for a while, I thought I was

                                                                                                the princess,

cotton candy pink, sitting there in my room, in the tower of the castle,

          young and beautiful and in love and waiting for you with

confidence

            but the princess looks into her mirror and only sees the princess,

while I’m out here, slogging through the mud, breathing fire,

                                                               and getting stabbed to death.

                                    Okay, so I’m the dragon. Big deal.

          You still get to be the hero.

You get magic gloves! A fish that talks! You get eyes like flashlights!

                  What more do you want?

I make you pancakes, I take you hunting, I talk to you as if you’re

            really there.

Are you there, sweetheart? Do you know me? Is this microphone live?

                                                       Let me do it right for once,

             for the record, let me make a thing of cream and stars that becomes,

you know the story, simply heaven.

                   Inside your head you hear a phone ringing

                                                               and when you open your eyes

only a clearing with deer in it. Hello deer.

                               Inside your head the sound of glass,

a car crash sound as the trucks roll over and explode in slow motion.

             Hello darling, sorry about that.

                                                       Sorry about the bony elbows, sorry we

lived here, sorry about the scene at the bottom of the stairwell

                                    and how I ruined everything by saying it out loud.

            Especially that, but I should have known.

You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together

            to make a creature that will do what I say

or love me back.

                  I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not

feeding yourself to a bad man

                                                   against a black sky prickled with small lights.

            I take it back.

The wooden halls like caskets. These terms from the lower depths.

                                                I take them back.

Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed.

                                                                                               Crossed out.

            Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something

underneath the floorboards.

                   Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle

                                                                                                reconstructed.

Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all

               forgiven,

even though we didn’t deserve it.

                                                                    Inside your head you hear

a phone ringing, and when you open your eyes you’re washing up

            in a stranger’s bathroom,

standing by the window in a yellow towel, only twenty minutes away

                           from the dirtiest thing you know.

All the rooms of the castle except this one, says someone, and suddenly

                                                                                              darkness,

                                                                                     suddenly only darkness.

In the living room, in the broken yard,

                                  in the back of the car as the lights go by. In the airport

          bathroom’s gurgle and flush, bathed in a pharmacy of

unnatural light,

             my hands looking weird, my face weird, my feet too far away.

And then the airplane, the window seat over the wing with a view

                                                            of the wing and a little foil bag of peanuts.

I arrived in the city and you met me at the station,

          smiling in a way

                    that made me frightened. Down the alley, around the arcade,

          up the stairs of the building

to the little room with the broken faucets, your drawings, all your things,

                                                I looked out the window and said

                                This doesn’t look that much different from home,

            because it didn’t,

but then I noticed the black sky and all those lights.

                                           We walked through the house to the elevated train.

            All these buildings, all that glass and the shiny beautiful

                                                                                             mechanical wind.

We were inside the train car when I started to cry. You were crying too,

            smiling and crying in a way that made me

even more hysterical. You said I could have anything I wanted, but I

                                                                                      just couldn’t say it out loud.

Actually, you said Love, for you,

                                 is larger than the usual romantic love. It’s like a religion. It’s

                                                                                                 terrifying. No one

                                                                                 will ever want to sleep with you.

Okay, if you’re so great, you do it—

                        here’s the pencil, make it work . . .

If the window is on your right, you are in your own bed. If the window

            is over your heart, and it is painted shut, then we are breathing

river water.

            Build me a city and call it Jerusalem. Build me another and call it

                                                                                                                 Jerusalem.

                            We have come back from Jerusalem where we found not

what we sought, so do it over, give me another version,

             a different room, another hallway, the kitchen painted over

and over,

             another bowl of soup.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

             Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time.

                                                                                                 Forget the dragon,

leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness.

                                        Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany,

             in gold light, as the camera pans to where

the action is,

             lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see

                                                the blue rings of my eyes as I say

                                                                                                   something ugly.

I never liked that ending either. More love streaming out the wrong way,

             and I don’t want to be the kind that says the wrong way.

But it doesn’t work, these erasures, this constant refolding of the pleats.

                                                            There were some nice parts, sure,

all lemondrop and mellonball, laughing in silk pajamas

             and the grains of sugar

                              on the toast, love love or whatever, take a number. I’m sorry

                                                                                  it’s such a lousy story.

Dear Forgiveness, you know that recently

                     we have had our difficulties and there are many things

                                                                                                  I want to ask you.

I tried that one time, high school, second lunch, and then again,

             years later, in the chlorinated pool.

                                      I am still talking to you about help. I still do not have

             these luxuries.

I have told you where I’m coming from, so put it together.

                                                            We clutch our bellies and roll on the floor . . .

             When I say this, it should mean laughter,

not poison.

                  I want more applesauce. I want more seats reserved for heroes.

Dear Forgiveness, I saved a plate for you.

                                                  Quit milling around the yard and come inside.

“Litany in Which Certain Things Are Crossed Out” by Richard Siken. From Crush, © 2006 by Yale University, published by Yale University Press.

Pity Me Not

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Pity me not because the light of day
At close of day no longer walks the sky;
Pity me not for beauties passed away
From field and thicket as the year goes by;
Pity me not the waning of the moon,
Nor that the ebbing tide goes out to sea,
Nor that a man’s desire is hushed so soon,
And you no longer look with love on me.

This love I have known always: love is no more
Than the wide blossom which the wind assails,
Than the great tide that treads the shifting shore,
Strewing fresh wreckage gathered in the gales.
Pity me that the heart is slow to learn
What the swift mind beholds at every turn.

Go gentle into the night

“Only once in your life, I truly believe, you find someone who can completely turn your world around. You tell them things that you’ve never shared with another soul and they absorb everything you say and actually want to hear more. You share hopes for the future, dreams that will never come true, goals that were never achieved and the many disappointments life has thrown at you. When something wonderful happens, you can’t wait to tell them about it, knowing they will share in your excitement. They are not embarrassed to cry with you when you are hurting or laugh with you when you make a fool of yourself. Never do they hurt your feelings or make you feel like you are not good enough, but rather they build you up and show you the things about yourself that make you special and even beautiful. There is never any pressure, jealousy or competition but only a quiet calmness when they are around. You can be yourself and not worry about what they will think of you because they love you for who you are. The things that seem insignificant to most people such as a note, song or walk become invaluable treasures kept safe in your heart to cherish forever. Memories of your childhood come back and are so clear and vivid it’s like being young again. Colours seem brighter and more brilliant. Laughter seems part of daily life where before it was infrequent or didn’t exist at all. A phone call or two during the day helps to get you through a long day’s work and always brings a smile to your face. In their presence, there’s no need for continuous conversation, but you find you’re quite content in just having them nearby. Things that never interested you before become fascinating because you know they are important to this person who is so special to you. You think of this person on every occasion and in everything you do. Simple things bring them to mind like a pale blue sky, gentle wind or even a storm cloud on the horizon. You open your heart knowing that there’s a chance it may be broken one day and in opening your heart, you experience a love and joy that you never dreamed possible. You find that being vulnerable is the only way to allow your heart to feel true pleasure that’s so real it scares you. You find strength in knowing you have a true friend and possibly a soul mate who will remain loyal to the end. Life seems completely different, exciting and worthwhile. Your only hope and security is in knowing that they are a part of your life.”

― Bob Marley

Jump

I have trained myself not to get all excited too easily about stuff (I still do about many things - like a blue butterfly, red rainbow or an unexpected mini-tornado :)... I start bunny-hopping around, especially with things having minimal obvious potential of somehow backfiring madly and ending up hurting me). But in matters of the heart, I am usually calm to the point of seeming indifference, even to myself. This mellowing is both good and bad, in any case a neat survival tactic.

The purpose of this ^ prelude is so I can emphasize why I'm happy that this ended up exciting me so much. The use of illustrations has dramatically magnified the simplicity of what Ray Bradbury conveyed in words. So, here's a message to self: 

Every once in a while, neatly fold away your intellect in a drawer.

.

.

.

Jump... and build your wings on the way down :)

http://zenpencils.com/comic/54-ray-bradbury-jump/

The Obligation to Be Happy

BY LINDA PASTAN

It is more onerous

than the rites of beauty

or housework, harder than love.

But you expect it of me casually,

the way you expect the sun

to come up, not in spite of rain

or clouds but because of them.

And so I smile, as if my own fidelity

to sadness were a hidden vice—

that downward tug on my mouth,

my old suspicion that health

and love are brief irrelevancies,

no more than laughter in the warm dark

strangled at dawn.

Happiness. I try to hoist it

on my narrow shoulders again—

a knapsack heavy with gold coins.

I stumble around the house,   

bump into things.

Only Midas himself

would understand.

Plant Sequoias

"Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.

And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.

When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won’t compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.

Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.

Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.

Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.

Listen to carrion — put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.

Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?

Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn’t go.

Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection."
— Wendell Berry

Secret Sharing of Secrets

"What we hunger for perhaps more than anything else is to be known in our full humanness, and yet that is often just what we also fear more than anything else. It is important to tell at least from time to time the secret of who we truly and fully are . . . because otherwise we run the risk of losing track of who we truly and fully are and little by little come to accept instead the highly edited version which we put forth in hope that the world will find it more acceptable than the real thing. It is important to tell our secrets too because it makes it easier . . . for other people to tell us a secret or two of their own . . . "
— Frederick Buechner (Telling Secrets)

A Fractal Ache

Reading this post by the amazing blogger Asha wounds me every time. I walk around with the memory of the last many hurts and this new hurt, multiplying....to a fractal ache.

Read to me...

"‘The Reader’ was heartbreaking because it was all about reading and being read to. You walked around wounded for a long time after that. 

So great was your need to read to someone once upon a time that you walk into an Old Age home one day, and ask the Mother Superior whether any of the old people there would like to be read to. She says yes, but then they try not to let them interact too much with young people because that would make them remember the children who abandoned them a long time ago, and the 

carefully constructed living-in-the-present would come apart in mindless, endless grief.

While you are talking to her, an old man comes in to ask if his son’s money order has come. His son hasn’t sent anything in years, nor bothered to come to see his father or call him or write to him. But this is a ritual the old man follows every day to retain what is left of his 'sanity', and the kind nuns indulge him.

You walk out, old, abandoned and bent, you do not walk around offering your reading anymore.

You remember the teachers in 'Blackboards', walking around with knowledge that no one wants to learn. What is worse, having riches that no one wants, or having nothing to give?"

We are all either hoping for, or offering something in our own ways. Hercules and the damsel in distress. We alternate between roles...each as unfulfilling. Fortunate are those that discover their calling, and have those around in need of them. 

Like an earnest mother, suckling a wailing infant.

Being the Wind over Prairies

'Belonging'... the reasons we wander the worlds but come back to the smells and sounds of our hometowns. That has rarely been summarized so aptly. We cannot build a new life in another world. For we are crippled by the constraints of father time.

“Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.” ― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

But when we have ambled enough in enough places among enough people...our hearts become the wind over prairies, whistling through the grasses, carrying the sound of grazing animals. We begin to belong in a sense, everywhere (as much as in a sense, nowhere).

Yet in our immense rush to see and be, what is the price we pay? We forget that we have not much time. (And, after all “It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.” )

“Please-tame me!' he said.
'I want to, very much,' the little prince replied. 'But I have not much time. I have friends to discover, and a great many things to understand.'
'One only understands the things that one tames,' said the fox. 'Men have no more time to understand anything. They buy things all ready made at the shops. But there is no shop anywhere where one can buy friendship, and so men have no friends any more. If you want a friend, tame me.'
'What must I do, to tame you?' asked the little prince.
'You must be very patient,' replied the fox. 'First you will sit down at a little distance from me-like that-in the grass. I shall look at you out of the corner of my eye, and you will say nothing. Words are the source of misunderstandings. But you will sit a little closer to me, every day...” 

― Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

Now, when all is not lost

Do not wait,
for the dawning of  a light.


If you are ever to come,
Come now,
Now, when the lines on my face are deep
and eroding from want of affection.


a string of jasmine would do,
a bustle of tube roses
a text.


Tonight,
I will teeter - at the hush of care.


July 24th, 2012.

Walk the mile

It is suddenly,
A little loud
A tad too cacophonous
In your world.

Sickness - like an answer
Settles with wet legs
On your dazzled heart.

You lay paralyzed,
Glaring at walls of photographs
Remembering.

Swirling smoke from half-spent cigars,
Songs of posterity - nestle
In red corners of your eyes.

The doing needs to be done,
You stick a needle in your shoe,
Walk the mile.
Walk the mile.
Walk the mile.

July 19th, 2012

Company - On the way out

Because Chayekhana is closed for last week or so, my temporary hangout is Gloria Jeans. I have a deep philosophical tirade brewing in my mind regarding that but it'll have to wait till later. Right now, I want to thank Gloria Jeans for this:

'And all I want is company 

Someone to understand this misery 

Send a reflection of myself to me 

'Cause everybody needs some company'...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qHo8I7TrLBo

Company

If you ask me I will say I'm fine 

All pink like birthday girls and valentines 

And then the stillness of the night reminds 

That I don't like to be alone 

My thoughts are race cars running 'round my head 

They burst into flames and they crash into my bed 

Until I fall into a dream instead 

Where all my lovers turn to stone 

And all I want is company 

Someone to understand this misery 

Send a reflection of myself to me 

'Cause everybody needs some company 

These times I'm living in just make no sense 

Sometimes my face gets pushed against the fence 

I want to scream out in my self-defense 

But I don't want to be alone 

And all I want is company 

Someone to understand this misery 

Send a reflection of myself to me 

'Cause everybody needs some company 

What is truth and what is fear 

Will I find it under here 

I know they're selling me a lie 

But I'm first in line to buy 

First in line to try 

I find some sanity on the written page 

Where life is worth more than a living wage 

They say the battle's over now it's time to change 

And I won't ever be alone 

And all I want is company 

Someone to understand this misery 

Send a reflection of myself to me 

'Cause everybody needs some company 

I need some company 

Must add this by Asha as a P.S.

"You are learning to empty your boat, drop your baggage, disconnect, detach, and lift up lighter and freer. You are on your way out."

Death is Nature's master stroke, albeit a cruel one

This is a passage I have returned to many many times in the past years.


"It is one of Nature's great insults that she should prefer to put ALL her eggs in the basket of a defenseless, incompetent neonate rather than in the tried and tested custody of our own superb minds. But as our neurofibrils begin to tangle, and that neonate walks to a wisdom that eludes us, we are forced to give Nature credit for her daring ideas. Of course, Nature, in her careless way, can get it wrong: people often die in the wrong order."


"Whenever you find yourself thinking 'it is better for him not to know', suspect you mean 'it is easier for me not to tell'."


"...giving a piece of yourself, some real sympathy, is worth more than allthe drugs in your pharmacopoeia to patients who are frightened, bereaved or weary of life."


~ Oxford Handbook of Clinical Medicine

First Rain

"In the words of Terry Pratchett - Leopards don't change their shorts."


Bah, life is good!


Good life holler to all kindred spirits out there :)

We Become our Choices

'When will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.'

When indeed?


Rebus


By
Jane Hirshfield


You work with what you are given,
the red clay of grief,
the black clay of stubbornness going on after.
Clay that tastes of care or carelessness,
clay that smells of the bottoms of rivers or dust.


Each thought is a life you have lived or failed to live,
each word is a dish you have eaten or left on the table.
There are honeys so bitter
no one would willingly choose to take them.
The clay takes them: honey of weariness, honey of vanity,
honey of cruelty, fear.


This rebus - slip and stubbornness,
bottom of river, my own consumed life -
when will I learn to read it
plainly, slowly, uncolored by hope or desire?
Not to understand it, only to see.


As water given sugar sweetens, given salt grows salty,
we become our choices.
Each yes, each no continues,
this one a ladder, that one an anvil or cup.


The ladder leans into its darkness.
The anvil leans into its silence.
The cup sits empty.


How can I enter this question the clay has asked?


(Rebus -- "A representation of words in the form of pictures or symbols, often presented as a puzzle.")

Via Asha's blog

A Sofa in a Room

The second coming is indeed at hand.
I watched the moon flicker blue behind thin twilight clouds in the city of thousand thoughts.
I drove by a woman unsteadily cradling a bouquet of fragrant flowers - on a street corner with no takers.
I wandered the streets in search for a sofa, a sofa in a room, a room in a clutter, a clutter called home.
I met myself, at every corner, from years past and years thence, shuddering off the spiders of moldy memories.
I watched machines doing mechanical things in robotic repetition; boys stealing kisses; men mauling mistresses; women pecking men - all masquerading meaning.
I saw raindrops marching in yellow reichs on shriveled flowers of christmas-lit silver oaks.
I reached out and found myself again, in a gentle smile across the table; in locks of blonde hair in a faraway land; in a pair of soft brown eyes at the breadth of a breath.
I grew my nails long and they stretched out farther, divorcing my fingertips.
I thought and thought, wave upon rising wave, on the night the moon was largest.
I crashed on my rocky shores and crumbled to sand.


Through long labor, I delivered myself, heaving a fresh sigh in this strange old world.


Jun 27th, 2012.

A Blessing for One Who is Exhausted

...You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

~ John O’Donohue

We owe so much to certain people, of those - the greatest are the ones that offer us healing. And that such people exist, are allowed to exist...brings faith. There is something to love on for, yet.

Who Deserves What

“Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.”

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

We die when we can, not when we should

From One Hundred Years of Solitude

“'What does he say?' he asked.
'He’s very sad,’ Úrsula answered, ‘because he thinks that you’re going to die.'
'Tell him,' the colonel said, smiling, 'that a person doesn’t die when he should but when he can.”

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez

"We don't die easy,

We're slow

lazy even here

at dying."

~ We Don't Die Easy


http://m-sirius-shams.blogspot.com/2008/08/we-dont-die-easy.html

Even if you are dying of fear

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.”

“Perhaps this is what the stories meant when they called somebody heartsick. Your heart and your stomach and your whole insides felt empty and hollow and aching.”

“sex is the consolation you have when you can't have love”

“Tell him yes. Even if you are dying of fear, even if you are sorry later, because whatever you do, you will be sorry all the rest of your life if you say no.” 

― Gabriel Garcí­a Márquez


Don't let love walk by, not when you see it, for fear.

Growing a Garden

Rukhiya emailed me this peace today. It speaks to me of grace, the grace of a woman...and integrity and self worth. Many of these walk my mind nowadays. Between waiting and seeking for answers, I have but one usurper of norms, one disturber of peace ~ hope. It barges into my world like the Tasmanian devil, displacing everything. Poking at little tucked in dreams, growing red wings for large chained ones. Hope I must lose and then I may finally - rest in peace.






'After awhile you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul.
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean security.
And you begin to understand that kisses aren't contracts
And presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With your head held high and your eyes wide open.
With the grace of a woman, not the grief of a child.
You learn to build your roads
On today because tomorrow's ground
Is too uncertain for plans, and futures have
A way of falling down in midflight.
After awhile you learn that even sunshine
Burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate
Your own soul, instead of waiting
For someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure,
That you really are strong.
And you really do have worth.
And you learn and learn...and you learn
With every goodbye you learn'




~ Veronica A. Shoffstall

Call me, maybe?

"When I go mad,
I call my friends by phone:
I am afraid they might think
They're alone."

 ~ Theodore Roethke

The year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway

What surprises me about certain prose is the poetic charm it holds. Like a slender, gently spiraling vase, holding a singular long-necked white rose. Grace, may I call it?

Grace

BY Joy Harjo


I think of Wind and her wild ways the year we had nothing to lose and lost it anyway in the cursed country of the fox. We still talk about that winter, how the cold froze imaginary buffalo on the stuffed horizon of snowbanks. The haunting voices of the starved and mutilated broke fences, crashed our thermostat dreams, and we couldn’t stand it one more time. So once again we lost a winter in stubborn memory, walked through cheap apartment walls, skated through fields of ghosts into a town that never wanted us, in the epic search for grace.

Like Coyote, like Rabbit, we could not contain our terror and clowned our way through a season of false midnights. We had to swallow that town with laughter, so it would go down easy as honey. And one morning as the sun struggled to break ice, and our dreams had found us with coffee and pancakes in a truck stop along Highway 80, we found grace.

I could say grace was a woman with time on her hands, or a white buffalo escaped from memory. But in that dingy light it was a promise of balance. We once again understood the talk of animals, and spring was lean and hungry with the hope of children and corn.

I would like to say, with grace, we picked ourselves up and walked into the spring thaw. We didn’t; the next season was worse. You went home to Leech Lake to work with the tribe and I went south. And, Wind, I am still crazy. I know there is something larger than the memory of a dispossessed people. We have seen it.