The light fell from the sky in cataracts of pure transparency, in torrents of silence and immobility.
The air was blue, you could hold it in your hand. Blue.
—Marguerite Duras, The Lover
Happy Pi Day! I hope you had a slice to celebrate today.
Category: love
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!
Continue reading “Love-in-Idleness”
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
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.
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.
Not Our Own
The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.
Colum McCann
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.
Continue reading “Crimson Shrine”
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!
Continue reading “Back With Their Flocks”
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
