Category: love

by Rachel Sally

Love-in-Idleness

Yet marked I where the bolt of Cupid fell.
It fell upon a little western flower,
Before, milk-white, now purple with love’s wound,
And maidens call it “love-in-idleness.”
Fetch me that flower; the herb I showed thee once.
The juice of it on sleeping eyelids laid
Will make or man or woman madly dote
Upon the next live creature that it sees.
Fetch me this herb, and be thou here again
Ere the leviathan can swim a league.

—Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act 2 Scene 1

Happy lovers’ day!
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by Rachel Sally

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

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by Rachel Sally

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.

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by Rachel Sally

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.

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by Rachel Sally

Crimson Shrine

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.
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by Rachel Sally

Back With Their Flocks

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!
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by Rachel Sally

Big Time

There are so many kinds of time. The time by which we measure our lives. Months and years.
Or the big time, the time that raises mountains and makes stars.
Or all the things that happen between one heartbeat and the next. It’s hard to live in all those kinds of times.
Easy to forget that you live in all of them.

Robert Charles Wilson, Spin

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by Rachel Sally

Silver as the Rainbow Scales

“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).

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