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!…
Category: salty sweet
Neutron Star
On Earth, just a teaspoon of neutron star
would weigh six billion tons. Six billion tons
equals the collective weight of every animal
on earth. Including the insects. Times three.
Six billion tons sounds impossible
until I consider how it is to swallow grief—
just a teaspoon and one might as well have consumed
a neutron star. How dense it is,
how it carries inside it the memory of collapse.
How difficult it is to move then.
How impossible to believe that anything
could lift that weight.
There are many reasons to treat each other
with great tenderness. One is
the sheer miracle that we are here together
on a planet surrounded by dying stars.
One is that we cannot see what
anyone else has swallowed.
—Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, Watching My Friend Pretend Her Heart Isn’t Breaking
Upside Down
Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you.
And do not worry that your life is turning upside down.
How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
—Rumi
Single Seed
تل دھرنے کو جگہ نہ ہونا / Tall Dharnay Ko Jagah Nah Hona / a place so crowded that no room remains even for a single seed of sesame
— Urdu phrase
Not A Sprint
Like wine through clay,
joy in his blood bursting his heart—the bliss!
Robert Browning, Pheidippides
It is my 26th birthday, today.
More pressing is that my exam, culmination of the last 3 months of my life, is next Friday.
I am therefore resolutely trying to ignore the fact that my birthday has arrived until then.
It has been a marathon, sans doute.
Bake the Vote
The vote is precious. It is almost sacred.
It is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in a democracy.
We must use it.
Sen. John Lewis
Quarter Century
What they don’t understand about birthdays and what
they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten,
and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and
three, and two, and one…
Because the way you grow old is kind of like an onion
or like the rings inside a tree trunk or like my little wooden
dolls that fit one inside the other,
each year inside the next
one.
—Sandra Cisneros
Chocolate Teacher
“If I were a headmaster I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead.”
Roald Dahl, History of Chocolate
Huitième
How to Not Be a Perfectionist
People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long—
Molly Brodak
I say this with incredulity: happy 8th birthday to La Pêche Fraîche.
