And her sweet red lips on these lips of mine
Burned like the ruby fire set
In the swinging lamp of a crimson shrine,
Or the bleeding wounds of the pomegranate,
Or the heart of the lotus drenched and wet
With the spilt-out blood of the rose-red wine.
– Oscar Wilde, “In the Gold Room – A Harmony.”
Oh, happy happy Valentine’s Day!
I hope you all had a day that included love and, at the very least, a little sweet treat.
Continue reading “Crimson Shrine”
When the song of the angels is stilled, when the star in the sky is gone,
when the kings and princes are home,
when the shepherds are back with their flocks,
the work of Christmas begins:
to find the lost,
to heal the broken,
to feed the hungry,
to release the prisoner,
to rebuild the nations,
to bring peace among the people, to make music in the heart.
—Howard Thurman
Merry Christmas!
Continue reading “Back With Their Flocks”
“What a wonderful thing the skin is! It is the largest and most important integument of the whole human organism!
What millions of pores it contains! The minutest aperture might absorb the deadliest poison.
Once in contact with the surface of the body, whether the particle be held in a miasma, or dissolved in the water of ablution, the pore, like a fatal canal, conveys it into the system, whence its eradication may be impossible, and where it may generate untold mischief.”
— “Skin, Baths, Bathing, and Soap,” Francis Pears for Pears Soap, 1859
“I’m afraid of getting older”, that’s what I learned to say
‘Cause society has given me the words to think that way.
The message spins and spirals, “Don’t get saggy, don’t get grey”
But the soft and lovely silvers are now falling on my shoulders.
My mother and my grandma, my great-grandmother too
They wrinkle like the river, they sweeten like the dew
And as silver as the rainbow scales that shimmer purple blue.
How can beauty that is living be anything but true?
So let gravity be my sculptor, let the wind do my hair,
Let me dance in front of people without a care.
—Incomprehensible, Big Thief
Happy birthday to me (from me).
You will never be able to escape from your heart.
So it’s better to listen to what it has to say.
—Paul Coelho, The Alchemist
Happy Valentine’s Day!…
What does the sentence “If you eat this fruit you will die” mean for Eve who is in a place where there is no death?
—Hélène Cixous, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
Happy Halloween, I guess.
Each year is like putting a new coat over all the old ones.
Sometimes I reach into the pockets of my childhood and pull things out.
—Simon Van Booy, “Little Birds”
Happy birthday (to me, from me).
If it could only be like this always – always summer, always alone, the fruit always ripe.
Evelyn Waugh
When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies?
Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness.
Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be!
Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quixote
