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.
the June nights are long and warm; the roses flowering; and the garden full of lust and bees,
Virginia Woolf, letter to Vanessa Bell
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.
The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.
Colum McCann
“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).
When we have run our passion’s heat,
Love hither makes his best retreat.
The gods, that mortal beauty chase,
Still in a tree did end their race:
Apollo hunted Daphne so,
Only that she might laurel grow.
—Andrew Marvell, The Garden, 1681
And day to day, life’s a hard job, you get tired, you lose the pattern.
You need distance, interval.
The way to see how beautiful the earth is, is to see it as the moon.
The way to see how beautiful life is, is from the vantage point of death.
― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Happy twelfth birthday to La Pêche Fraîche.
“… Sometimes I have kept my feelings to myself, because I could find no language to describe them in …”
Jane Austen
Either a snail’s moist web of moonlight, or someone’s hot breath at four a.m. when the night has been too much, has eaten you whole.
This is my life.
It has been sifted through the bones of my body, through blood. It is all that I have.
—Joy Harjo
Happy birthday to me, from me.
