It is a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in the broken world.
—Mary Oliver
OK, 2026. Yikes.
Continue reading “This Fresh Morning”
Author: Rachel Sally
Frost and Desolation
I feel a cold northern breeze play upon my cheeks, which braces my nerves and fills me with delight.
Do you understand this feeling?
This breeze, which has travelled from the regions towards which I am advancing, gives me a foretaste of those icy climes.
Inspirited by this wind of promise, my daydreams become more fervent and vivid. I try in vain to be persuaded that the pole is the seat of frost and desolation; it ever presents itself to my imagination as the region of beauty and delight.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even… a mouse.
Happy Christmas all!
Swallowed With All Hope
Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days.
Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires
with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals.
Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices.
Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way
for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review
each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments
of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you.
Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound
of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart.
Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope,
where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all
the things you did and could have done. Remember
treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes
pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.
Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale, Dan Albergotti
Return to Crab
Porcellanopagurus is one of the many attempts of Nature to evolve a crab.
—Lancelot Alexander Borradaile
CRUSTACEA. PART II.–PORCELLANOPAGURUS: AN INSTANCE OF CARCINIZATION. 1916
Flirty and Thriving
Little by little, and also by great leaps
life happened to me, and how insignificant this business is.
These veins carried my blood, which I scarcely ever saw,
I breathed the air of so many places without keeping a sample of any.
In the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he has, and life is only a borrowing of bones.
—Pablo Neruda, October Fullness
It’s my 30th birthday today! Now begins my journey to thirty, flirty, and thriving.
Summer Smoldering
“Anyway it will be autumn tomorrow or the next day: I can smell it in the air—summer smoldering.”
— J. L. Carr, from A Month in the Country (Harvester Press, 1980)
Wide Orange Sky
“The evening sky was awash with peach, apricot, cream: tender little ice-cream clouds in a wide orange sky.”
― The Golden Compass
Garden Full of Lust and Bees
the June nights are long and warm; the roses flowering; and the garden full of lust and bees,
Virginia Woolf, letter to Vanessa Bell
Treizième
And what is it to work with love?
It is to weave the cloth with threads drawn from your heart, even as if your beloved were to wear that cloth.
It is to build a house with affection, even as if your beloved were to dwell in that house.
It is to sow seeds with tenderness and reap the harvest with joy, even as if your beloved were to eat the fruit.
It is to charge all things you fashion with a breath of your own spirit,
And to know that all the blessed dead are standing about you and watching.
—Khalil Gibran
Happy 13th birthday to La Pêche Fraîche. Lucky lucky.